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WINGED SEEDS 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NKW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OP CANADA, Lro. 

TORONTO 












East Drive in November. 




WINGED SEEDS 


BY 


BERTHA OPPENHEIM 


* \ 

> * 

«* w> > 


jRfto gorfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1923 

All rights reserved 




PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



Copyright, 1923, 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 


Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1923. 


Press of 

J. J. Little & Ives Company 
New York, U. S. A. 


©C1A7C0501 

OCT 24 \923 
- . I \ 



FOREWORD 


Everyone who would understand farm life spir¬ 
itually and socially, as well as somewhat technically, 
will enjoy “Winged Seeds.” 

The sweep, almost epic, with which the city doc¬ 
tor and his wife through vision, science, pluck, and 
sheer love of the life, achieved a country home, 
developed a successful agricultural enterprise, and 
added joy to a rural community, will delight those 
who farm either actually or in dreams. 

Merely a segment of the career of two co-oper¬ 
ating personalities of extraordinary interest and 
attractiveness, the portrayal leaves an eagerness for 
more about them—a healthful close of a narrative. 

Not only that farming itself, but particularly the 
Green Mountain State on the shores of Lake Cham¬ 
plain, should find an interpreter with knowledge, 
sympathy, and a gift of expression, is cause for 
rejoicing. 

May there be carried on every wind the good 
cheer of “Winged Seeds.” 


Frank S. Hackett. 
















CONTENTS 


CHAPTER VACS 

I Beginnings . i 

II Building .. . m . io 

III Playtime. r . 23 

IV Interludes . w . 33 

V Plans and Dreams. 45 

VI Joys and Problems. 56 

VII Granite Walls and Romance ... 66 

VIII A Unique Christmas and Embryo 

Farming.76 

IX At the Farm at Last.89 


X Apprenticeship, Artesian Wells and 

Many Other Things.102 

XI Adventures in Cloud and Rain, under 


Sun and Moon.115 

XII A New Year’s Visit to the Farm and 

Neighbors.130 

XIII Farm Happenings and Stone House 

Guests.141 

XIV Lame Ducks, Orchard Grass and Races 156 

XV “Many Inventions”.169 

XVI The Rose Garden, Holstein-Friesian 

Cattle and Controversial Motors . 181 

• • 

vu 













CONTENTS 


VIII 

CHAPTER 

XVII 

XVIII 

XIX 

XX 


Winter Days of Leisure, the Adven¬ 
ture OF PoLTRON AND THE SOUTH FARM 

More Building, More Problems, More 
Joys, Pruning Apple Trees 

Community Ideals, the Race Track, 
Farming in Downright Earnest . 

Wings Are Full-Grown on the Seeds 
of Dreams. 


PAGE 

192 

205 

215 

230 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


East Drive in November. Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

Sunrise in the Pines. 9 

The Long House.21 

When Spring Conies to Lewis Creek and the Ancient 
Willow.64 

Frozen Spindrift.131 

Larkspurs and Moonflowers.189 

Draft Mare with Colt One Day Old .... 209 

Looking Northwest from the Balustrade at Sunset . 241 






WINGED SEEDS 


WINGED SEEDS 


CHAPTER ONE 

BEGINNINGS 

T HIS is the story of a farm, of how it came into 
being, and of its development. 

It began in a studio, of all places. One windy 
night, the Doctor and I went to dine with our 
friends, Walter Appleton Clark and Nancy in their 
studio home. I remember we traveled up into 
prosaic Harlem and got off the no less prosaic Ele¬ 
vated at 104 th Street. All the neighborhood seemed 
redolent of happier, more prosperous times. We 
opened a sagging paling gate, and walked through 
a decrepit yard that had once been a garden. We 
went through a long, narrow alleyway, and there 
we were. From the outside, it looked what in all 
probability it had been, a stable. But the door 
opened; we were welcomed joyfully by Walter and 
Nancy, and ushered into the great, raftered, dimly- 
lit, quaint place. 

The studio-living-room must have been at least 
eighty feet long and almost as wide. Unlit places 
yawned ahead of us, like caverns. Most of it was 


2 


WINGED SEEDS 


in darkness. Things jumped out at you here and 
there, as you grew accustomed to the bright pools 
of light near candles or lamp and the black pools of 
darkness elsewhere. A low couch with many 
cushions extended all along one side. There were 
oases of armchairs scattered about, with little 
tables and lights. There were old hangings on the 
walls, a model stand, several easels with unfinished 
pictures; sketches, with their faces turned to the 
wall, stood everywhere. Off this big room was a 
tiny one, used as a dining room. 

Walter and Nancy were newly married. They 
were still bemoaning wedding gifts that had to be 
displayed for the sake of loving relatives who ex¬ 
pected to see them in use. Walter said he wished 
he could “murder his various aunts with their ornate 
clocks and mermaids and dancing girls.” 

Dinner was announced, and an appetizing-looking 
joint of spring lamb appeared, dressed in its inevi¬ 
table bunch of mint. We drew our chairs to the 
table expectantly. 

There was no carving knife. We searched gayly 
through drawers of unfinished sketches, broken 
antiques, color tubes, India ink and what not, over¬ 
turning brass candelabra, spilling candle grease, 
cluttering up remorselessly the already cluttered 
studio. At last the elusive tool was found. It had 
been used to scrape paint off a palette. We got 
our lamb with all the trimmings. 

Walter had come across a sheaf of kodak pictures 


BEGINNINGS 


3 


of Lake Champlain in Vermont, taken years before 
on a sketching trip. “Show you the most beautiful 
place in the world, Doctor, if we ever get through 
this dinner.” Gathering around the mellowest pool 
of light, made by a bronze student lamp, we drank 
our coffee and looked at the kodak prints. Right 
there began our dream. Right there were planted 
the seeds that so many years later grew wings. 

They were pictures taken from a boat off the 
Westport shore, with the Adirondack mountains as 
a background. There were prints of old Vergennes 
on the Otter, with its picturesque falls, its stately 
elms and maples. There were views of Sleepy Otter 
Creek and Fort Cassin; views of old, gambrel- 
roofed farmhouses, nestling on wooded hills; views 
of tree-hung coves, and great, ancient rocks; views 
of rugged shore lines and still pools; pictures of 
wind-tossed trees on strange-shaped islands. Al¬ 
ways there was the wondrous background of a great 
lake, of misty hills, and green valleys. 

Before bed time we decided that Vermont, on 
Lake Champlain was the place of all places for our 
summer vacation. We must get a tent and camp in 
sight of all that loveliness. In this wise the farm 
began, little as we dreamed it at the time. 

When May grew warm and we grew tired, the 
thought of apple blossoms around old farmhouses, 
the singing of birds in swaying trees, helped us to 
bear the noise and smells and daily grind of life in 
town. Those were young days of hard beginnings 


4 


WINGED SEEDS 


and we could not leave until August. How we 
longed for the smell of the wind from out the 
Adirondack pine woods! How we ached for the 
sight, the feel, the sparkle of Lake Champlain! 
Even the longest waiting ends at last. August came. 
New York was stifling. Too tired to be gay, we saw 
our precious tent, our folding and dove-tailed aids 
to camp living and cooking, safely aboard the Albany 
night boat. 

We were off at last! The air on the crowded 
boat was maddening. The very stars in the heavens 
glittered hotly. But we were on the way; what 
matter discomfort more or less? From Troy, 
ancient of name, modern in ugliness, we took the 
train for Westport, where a little puffing steamer 
ferry crossed the lake to Basin Harbour Land¬ 
ing, our objective point. The name of the boat, 
curiously enough, was the Victor, her pilot and 
owner was old Captain Daniels of Vergennes. We 
were on the lake, we saw the mountains, we smelt 
the wind. New York with its grind, its clamor, its 
deadly heat seemed like a bad dream. That March 
night, in Walter’s studio was the bridge over which 
we had passed into another life. 

Before long we were dumped on a rock-built, 
tumble-down dock, bag and baggage. Dumped, I 
say, literally. But dumped into a golden, glowing 
sunset, with no sound but the water, the wind in the 
pines, and cowbells far away. The busy-sounding 
little steamer drew away, out into the lake on its 


BEGINNINGS 


5 


way through Otter Creek to Vergennes. No one 
seemed interested in us or in our belongings. A 
bare-legged boy sat fishing at the dock’s edge. A 
farmer went past, driving his cows ahead of him. 
A collie dog snuffed around us in friendly fashion. 
Truly, here was solitude, peace, absence of all tur¬ 
moil. However, we were much too tired and hun¬ 
gry to go into ecstasy over landscape or sunset. 
What we wanted was something to eat, and a place 
to sleep. 

A few rods beyond and back from the dock was 
the old, pre-Revolutionary stone house we remem- 
berfd having seen on one of the kodak views. From 
its chimney issued smoke. While I stayed to watch 
our belongings, the Doctor walked up to the door. 
He was greeted with old-time hospitality by Mrs. 
Winans and asked to stay the night. “Bring 
your wife, Doctor.” Somehow, his profession was 
always recognized. There was something about his 
expression, about his sensitive hands, that people 
felt and recognized immediately. Once, before our 
marriage, he was answering a call at night, in a 
very tough neighborhood. Two men held him up. 
Suddenly, the weirdest-appearing of the two looked 
at him, saying: “Aw, we do’ want t’ hurt yer none, 
Doc’.” And they went with him to his destination 
for protection. 

“Who’ll watch our tent?” I asked Mrs. Winans. 
“Oh, never mind, no one’ll tech yer things.” They 
remained on that dock all night and were not mo- 


6 


WINGED SEEDS 


lested. Such a supper as we ate! Such deep, 
dreamless sleep! Ah, we were young. Our life lay 
before us. 

Before noon the following day, we had permis¬ 
sion to set up our camp in a beautiful cove on the 
Winans farm. A cove protected by over-hanging 
cedar branches—its outlook toward the setting sun 
and the glory of the Adirondack hills. We had 
hired a boat, and made arrangements for milk and 
cream, butter and eggs. We had been told the most 
likely fishing places. We set up our primitive 
housekeeping. Nothing but the canvas of our tent 
was between us and the glories of the sun and the 
sky during the hours of light. We had only to open 
our tent flap and all the beauty of the night and the 
stars was ours. The blessed silence, the blessed 
solitude of the lake and the hills was ours. Walter 
was right. It was the most beautiful place in the 
world. 

Time passed all too swiftly. We had busy days 
full of wholesome toil, splendid exercise, and purest 
joy. We got acquainted all over again. Neither 
one of us had realized our passionate love of the 
outdoors. The vivid beauty of all the life about 
us filled our cup of content to over-flowing. We 
both remembered old longings, sternly repressed. 
City life, and creating a medical practice is a soul- 
and body-absorbing occupation. What a lucky, 
lucky night it had been at Walter Clark’s! 

One evening, in late August, filled with insect 


BEGINNINGS 


7 


sound and falling stars, we had a huge fire of fat 
pine and hemlock. By that fire we dreamed 
dreams. The winter before, the Doctor had writ¬ 
ten his first book, “The Development of the Child.” 
On its success depended much. In our joy of the 
open, everything splendid seemed possible. 

“How would you like to take an option on some 
land on the lake shore?” My heart skipped a beat. 
“Suppose we look around to-morrow.” Was there 
ever anyone who could think of so many thrilling 
possibilities? There was never a time when he 
could not keep one’s so-called mind on the jump, 
trying to keep pace with his. 

I think I was dreaming of owning a cow and a 
horse and chickens and all sorts of delightful things 
when the Doctor awakened me for our swim, with 
which we began our day. The day was young as 
were we. The newly-risen sun and the sky made 
sparkly pictures on the water, with evergreen 
shadows and misty hills for background. 

We found Jim Winans in the barn, milking his 
cows. They were grades, part Guernsey, part Ayr¬ 
shire. But we did not know it then—they were just 
plain cows to us both. The barn was rather smelly, 
and, I fear, very messy. This was before the time 
of big, co-operative milk plants, County Agricultural 
Agents, and scientific supervision of farms. To the 
Doctor’s questions about land, Jim said: “Ask Will 
Kimball. His farm’s right nex’ t’ ourn. He’s got 
some lake shore guess he’s aimin’ t’ git rid of.” 


8 


WINGED SEEDS 


So we fared on to Will Kimball’s, and came to a 
big, run-down farm, owned by Kimball and his 
mother, a widow. “Yes, he’d some land, but ther’ 
wuz a woman fr’m N’ York hed kin’ a spoke fer it.” 

Immediately that piece of land grew in desira¬ 
bility. We looked at each other with sparkling 
eyes. I dared say nothing. When the Doctor and 
I went on treasure-hunting expeditions to antique 
shops, he invariably cautioned me beforehand not 
to show my admiration either in words or by looks, 
for I had an unfortunate way of making the price go 
up. I remembered, and did not make a sound. 
Will Kimball walked over to the lake shore with us, 
and showed us the six or eight acres of virgin wood 
land bordering the lake, “he aimed t’ git rid of.” 

Saints in Heaven! Was there ever anything so 
absolutely beautiful! Old oaks and maples, pines, 
hemlocks, white birches, gray poplars, shagbarks, 
and cedars, hundreds and hundreds of them; great 
mossy rocks, a sandy beach sheltered from the 
north—all this had a view toward the west and 
ranges and ranges of Adirondack hills. Back of 
the woods, toward the south, was a partially cleared 
meadow. “For a garden,” sang my heart. And 
beyond lay the peaceful, fertile Green Mountain 
valley. We made the bargain then and there with¬ 
out in the least knowing how we were going to pay 
for the land. How I pitied “the woman who hed 
kin’ a wanted it.” It was ours. It was ours! We 
owned a piece of God’s beautiful earth. Those 









Sunrise in the Pines. 






BEGINNINGS 


9 

were our oaks, our maples, our rocks; that was our 
shore! 

When night fell, our tent would not hold us. We 
slept on our land, on pine boughs, wrapped in 
blankets, under the vaulted sky, with the whippoor¬ 
wills calling to the water, and the trees whispering 
to the stars. I say, we slept. Sheer happiness 
would not let us sleep. We talked and planned 
most of the night, and listened to the strange 
rustling and whispering and murmuring all about 
us. 

It seemed as if we had barely closed our eyes, 
when an inquisitive chipmunk awoke us. Low bird 
calls greeted the loveliest dawn we had ever seen, 
pale iris and silvery gold, with wreathing, gauzy 
mist over all the dew-drenched world. What de¬ 
lightful thing had happened? Oh, yes, the sun was 
rising on our land. And with the sunrise came 
soberness. What we had now to do was to get back 
to town and work; work and economize. This land 
had to be paid for and a bungalow had to be built. 
Dreams would not do it, nor happy nights of sleep¬ 
lessness. 


CHAPTER TWO 


BUILDING 

O FFICE hours began to be a busy time for us. 

The Doctor’s compelling, magnetic person¬ 
ality, his untiring, selfless devotion to all alike, his 
great love for his chosen work were beginning to 
tell at last. God was good to us, and the book ar¬ 
rived. While it brought little in the way of financial 
returns, it brought undreamed-of results in the way 
of our medical practice. People who counted be¬ 
gan to see the genius of the pioneer in the Doctor’s 
work. Universities became interested. Heads of 
their physiology, psychology, and philosophy de¬ 
partments recognized his work. One snowy eve¬ 
ning, Nicholas Murray Butler, then Professor of 
Psychology and Philosophy at Columbia University, 
and George Rice Carpenter, of the Department of 
English and Literature, came to see what manner 
of man was this Doctor, who wrote in scholarly 
language of medicine and psychology, of child study 
and development. This interview was the begin¬ 
ning of a life-long friendship with both Dr. Butler 
and Professor Carpenter. 

The evening seemed long to me, who waited 
alone. At last, it was no longer evening but night, 

IO 


BUILDING 


11 

I heard the welcome sound of closing doors, and 
the Doctor’s step coming upstairs. “Let’s cele¬ 
brate. To-night is a turning point in our lives.” 
He went on to tell me what had happened and had 
been talked about in his office that night. We had 
some music. I often wondered what our neighbors 
thought about our late hours of playing and singing. 
Long after all righteous mortals should have been 
asleep, we went out into the snow-filled, star-lit 
night. We walked down to Burns on Sixth Avenue 
and were very gay over our oysters and celery and 
Pilsner. The Doctor dared me to walk across the 
Brooklyn Bridge to finish the night, but at that I 
balked, thinking of the morning. 

This recognition only spurred us on to renewed 
effort, to harder work. We actually were able to 
meet one payment after the other on our land. 
“Now it’s paid up to the big white pine, you remem¬ 
ber. Now to the scarlet oak.” By another spring, 
the land was ours, paid for, every square inch of it. 
All that long, busy winter we lived and worked with 
a background of woods, hills, lake shore, garden, 
and, wonder of wonders, a house. We had the 
temerity to draw plans on paper. We knew ex¬ 
actly how it would look; at least, the Doctor knew. 
All his minute explanations did nothing but give 
me a hazy idea of a long, wide porch, a big shadowy 
living room with a stone fireplace. The thing that 
interested me most was the fireplace. A fire of logs 
and a garden! I could not grasp anything more. 


12 


WINGED SEEDS 


You sec, I had little imagination. The vision 
was his, the work was his, the accomplishment 
was his. Mine was but the detail of trying to 
make a bit smooth the rough places in his path. 

“The Long House” we named it, before it was 
born, like a much-desired and long looked-for child, 
“The Long House” in memory of the Six Nations 
of Iroquois who once roamed and hunted over all 
this lake shore. In their councils they spoke of 
themselves as “We of the Long House.” We 
pored over seed catalogues, subscribed to the Gar¬ 
den Magazine. We managed to get away by the 
end of a fearful July. This time the trip by water 
seemed too long. We took the midnight train from 
Grand Central Terminal, arriving at Vergennes by 
noon of the following day. We had written to the 
Winans, and were met at the station with a team 
that looked as if it had all the world’s burdens on 
its thin shoulders. 

The drive from Vergennes to the lake at Basin 
Harbour is over about eight miles of very bad clay 
road, bad underfoot, but very lovely overhead and 
all about. We drove through beautiful, woodsy 
lanes, full of green trees and singing birds, over old 
covered bridges, with signs, “Walk your Horses.” 
As if that tired-out work team and most of the 
others we met, could possibly have done anything 
but walk. And always the sleepy Otter meandered 
peacefully through the sunny landscape; always the 
fertile, wide Addison Valley lay before us, sloping 


BUILDING 


i3 

down to the lake; always we were in sight of deep 
blue hills. 

We got settled in the old Winans house, which 
was as uncomfortable inside as it was picturesque 
when seen from without. Built of great blocks of 
gray granite, with ampelopsis trailing over it, it just 
melted into the gray-green of the trees and rocks. 
The windows were small, built for protection 
against Indians and cold winters. Ceilings were 
low for the same reason, and the rooms were al¬ 
ways dusky, even on the most brilliant days of sun. 
We were soon thoroughly at home and very happy. 
The Doctor endeared himself to everyone. We 
had barely arrived when the hired man cut his foot 
with a dull axe, that worst of all cuts. Naturally, 
the Doctor took care of it. A physician is such an 
asset. 

We set up our tent, which we had left on the 
Winans place over the winter, on our own lake 
shore. And then began a busy time. I got dinner 
for us two and for the man we had hired to help 
us. In this way we could spend all the long sum¬ 
mer days on our land. In those times a hired man 
received for a ten-hour day one dollar and found, 
which meant his board and keep. We let Jordan 
sleep in the tent. And so our building began. We 
started by clearing away dead and fallen trees and 
brush in what seemed to us the most desirable place 
for our house, the highest point of our eight acres. 

Will Jordan was a character. There were few 


14 


WINGED SEEDS 


country things which he had not tried at some time 
in his life. Farm work, fishing, icing, lumbering, 
guiding, carpenter and mason work. All these he 
had tried, and always with special stress laid on 
drinking. This last was his undoing. He was un¬ 
couth, not over clean, ragged, with the story of drink 
written large in his face. Yet he had the eyes of a 
dreamer; bright blue eyes, deep set in his furrowed, 
tanned face. He had a strange gentleness and love 
for animals, and showed surprising courtesy toward 
me. He knew the woods like a wild thing, and, 
most astonishing of all, he could quote poetry and 
knew the Psalms. 

When it rained, we stopped chopping and clear¬ 
ing and went fishing. We were drenched to the 
skin, of course, but that was part of the game. 
We were young. On rainy days, too, neighbors 
came to see what the “Doc fr’m th’ city an’ his 
Missus were up to.” We enjoyed those friendly 
talks and frank questions quite as much as any of 
our callers. And soon we found they had adopted 
us. Gifts came in the form of doughnuts, early 
apples, jellies, and more goodies. In exchange, the 
Doctor played to them. He had brought his 
cello, and I sang. People of the lonely places do 
love a fiddle; cello or violin, it is all the same to 
them. 

August and our playtime was nearing its end. 
We decided to stay on a few days longer; there was 
still so much left to do. We had gotten out cedar 


BUILDING 


15 


posts enough to make a start. We started with the 
porch. When the holes were dug and the posts set, 
we felt almost as if the house were in place. Mean¬ 
while a man from Essex, across the lake, one Burn¬ 
ham, a carpenter and builder, had come to see us 
in regard to our house plans. I believe he thought 
us crazy when we told him our ideas for our home, 
and showed him the plans the Doctor had drawn. 
Our later knowledge of northern Vermont and the 
lake climate and general conditions, taught us that 
Burnham was in a measure justified. However, we 
made the contract for the Long House, at what 
would to-day seem a ridiculously low price. It was 
to be built of clapboards and shingles, cedar posts 
with the bark on for trimming and for general 
use. It turned out to be a most picturesque and 
livable house, in which we spent six happy sum¬ 
mers. 

The house was planned to consist mainly of a great 
central living room, forty by fifty, roughly raftered, 
two stories high, with the west end curtained off for 
a dining room. There was to be a stone fireplace 
at the east end. This fireplace the Doctor meant to 
help build with his own hands. At the west end of 
the living room, at the side of the dining room were 
to be two stairways leading up to a sort of mezza¬ 
nine gallery which was to run all around the room, 
except at the fireplace end. Off this gallery would 
be the bedrooms. It would all be simple and attrac¬ 
tive. The clap-boards were to be stained moss 


16 


WINGED SEEDS 


green like the shadows that filtered in from the sun¬ 
shine in the surrounding trees. It would truly be a 
glorified living in the woods. 

Later, when we could afford to remain until the 
end of September, we found that this Italian, 
southern style of building was indeed attractive, but 
not warm. Dancing firelight and leaping shadows 
are romantic, but shivery when the nights are 
crisp. 

There was to be a kitchen beyond the dining 
room, with a wood-burning stove, and, eventually, 
we hoped, running water fed by a windmill. The 
kitchen cupboards were to have doors both sides, 
with the drawers opening both ways, wonderfully 
convenient. There was to be a bathroom, luxury 
of luxuries, on the lake in those days. 

Before leaving, we arranged with Jordan to 
plough a piece of the cleared meadow land for our 
garden, to plant the garden in the spring and to look 
after it until our arrival, and also to prune two old 
apple trees we had discovered in our meadow. 

And then we folded our tent and went back to 
another winter of endeavor. It was an inspiring 
thing to work with so splendid a goal always before 
one. It made the thousand cares and burdens of a 
steadily growing practice with its attendant com¬ 
munity, educational, and hospital work easier to 
bear. It made difficult things worth while, many 
times over. 

In February, Burnham began with the building 


BUILDING 


17, 

of our house. By the end of June it was ready to 
be lived in. When we made our first payment for 
lumber, nails, and so on, we received in return with 
our receipts a pail of delicious maple sugar from 
Burnham. We seemed always to meet a little touch 
of human friendliness and good will. The Doctor 
had a wand of magic. He brought out humanness 
in the most unlikely persons. At times, I think, 
next to his passion for healing and his love of 
beauty, came this eternal desire to bring out the 
good which, he insisted is in every human soul, “if 
only it can be touched.” 

Burnham wrote: “Your house is pretty as a 
picture, but I’d not want to live in it.” 

Everything we could scrape together went into 
simple furnishings for the Long House. Cots, 
kitchen tables, spindle chairs, all were to be stained 
moss green and leaf brown, after they were in place. 
Those days we took linen, china, bedding, and more 
back and forth with us. Meanwhile family and 
friends presented us with brass candlesticks and 
bowls, green and brown pottery, cushions, flags, and 
other delightful things for decorative purposes. 
In late April I sent the garden seeds up to Jordan. 
By the middle of May he planted them and wrote 
weirdly-spelled and very amusing letters anent all 
things at the lake. Invariably he began with the 
weather. “A fine rain, a late frost, a good thaw, 
bright sunshine.” Years later we came to realize 
what a role of tremendous importance weather plays 


18 


WINGED SEEDS 


in the country dwellers’ life; a thing of hope and 
fear, always to be reckoned with, never to be 
counted on. 

Then the Doctor got an attack of appendicitis, 
and June found him at the hospital and very ill. 
From his sick bed we got ourselves, our maids, our 
dog and cat, and all the rest of our belongings off 
for Vermont. We were fearfully excited. Think 
of going up to the lake, to live on our land in our 
own, paid-for new house! We arrived in a pouring 
rain, bag and baggage; and the first thing we did 
was to put the Doctor to bed in a hastily unpacked 
cot and mattress. Fortunately, I had sent up our 
freight several weeks before this. Porch, living 
room, every available and unavailable place was 
filled with shavings, boxes, barrels, bales, and what 
not, piled every which way. But there we were, in 
our wonderful house, with things to eat, with a fire 
in the kitchen stove, which Jordan had been ordered 
to set up against our arrival, with a place to 
sleep. 

The house was even more attractive than we had 
hoped. Nora, our faithful maid, and her young 
niece, whom we had brought with us, were perfectly 
happy. They said the woodstove and the smoke in 
the kitchen, and having no water in the house, but 
lots outdoors, and trees and everything so green, re¬ 
minded them of home in Ireland. The Winans and 
the Kimballs and other kindly neighbors had sent in 
every imaginable thing from split stove wood to 


BUILDING 


*9 

apple pies and cream, and came to offer help, hav¬ 
ing heard of the Doctor’s illness. 

To get order out of this chaos, was unending fun. 
Of course, we stopped to go fishing, for a swim, to 
call on the neighbors, to watch milking when we 
went for supplies, to have picnics. After all, this 
was our playtime, our family of six, counting the 
dog and cat, were in love with life, and life to be 
real cannot always be lived on schedule, and should 
not. It was part of the Doctor’s creed: “Take 
time to see beautiful things, take time to ask ques¬ 
tions. Stop and have your moment of joy. What 
matters a late and less perfect meal? What matter 
curtains hung a day later?” 

Each day saw something accomplished. Jordan 
was here, there, everywhere; unpacking barrels, 
setting up beds, bringing in splendid fish, cleaning 
out a chimney that smoked, as only a new chimney 
can. Somehow, no one of us felt that all this was 
hard work. It seemed like a long-continued picnic, 
although no door closed, no drawer would push out, 
although squirrels and mice had made nests in every 
place they should not have been. The Doctor be¬ 
gan to get his strength back miraculously. The sec¬ 
ond week, we got a mason, hunted up stone on the 
place, and Kimball drew it for us. Then the fire¬ 
place was built, roughly put together, roughly 
cemented. We had the village blacksmith make a 
crane. The kettle was an heirloom, put away in 
our New York store-room for years. It took just 


20 


WINGED SEEDS 


one week of hard work, and made a dreadful mess 
in the living room. 

By that time the maids and I had stained cots, 
tables, chairs, had made the curtains and hangings, 
all soft browns and greens and reds of the simplest 
and most inexpensive materials. Flags hung over 
the gallery railing, cedar branches, grasses, and cat¬ 
tails stood about in brass bowls and in pottery 
vases. On the big, soft-wood, green-stained center 
table were lamps and books and magazines. Tall- 
backed spindle chairs were drawn close. There 
were cots disguised as couches, fishing rods and 
guns, hickory rockers, and little stands with smok¬ 
ing material, and more books and magazines. 
Things altogether began to wear a look of having 
been lived with, to acquire a feel of home, as if it 
had been home for years and years. Casement win¬ 
dows, really doors, opened on the long, wide porch, 
which extended the entire length of the house. It 
was named the Long House for more reasons than 
one. Everywhere was the outlook into sun-flecked 
green trees, toward the sparkling waters of the 
lake, with the wooded, misty hills beyond. The 
beauty of the sun rising over newly-wakened woods, 
the joy of ever-changing, vivid sunsets, and the 
golden after-glow on the Adirondack hills, the 
peace of quiet moonlight creeping from tree to tree, 
turning the iron night to molten silver—all these 
wondrous things were ours. 

The day we picked our first peas, we were ready 











Long House Porch. 



The Long House 






BUILDING 


21 


to make our first fire. The Doctor was brown and 
had regained his appetite. We asked the neigh¬ 
bors to come in. It was in the midst of haying, and 
very hot, but we hoped against hope for rain or a 
storm to give reason and tone to our sacred first 
fire rite. As usual, we were in luck. In the after¬ 
noon, a thunderstorm came up with a big gale from 
the north. The lake was lashed into mountains of 
waves. Our stage was set most dramatically. We 
all helped to bring in dry kindling, to drag up big 
chunks. How we did enjoy the laying of that fire! 
There is something of the savage in us all. 

Evening came. It was cool. Our guests arrived. 
They said they had never seen so cosy a place, as 
we gathered around our stone fireplace. Mine was. 
the joy of shaving a curled stick and starting the 
fire. Up curled the tiny flame watched by us all in 
awed silence. In two minutes great tongues of 
flame went roaring up the chimney. The Doctor 
started to sing “America.” We all stood and sang, 
and cheered everything from our country to the fire. 
Until midnight we told tales and ate ice cream and 
drank cider; a fearsome combination, but no one 
seemed the worse for it next day. The north wind 
most obligingly howled a fitting accompaniment. 
Thus was the Long House consecrated. 

All through August, Jordan and the Doctor 
worked hard. They finished the cedar porch rail¬ 
ing and made rustic chairs and tables of cedar. 
Then they began clearing our woods. Nora 9 Delia, 


22 


WINGED SEEDS 


and I tended the vegetable garden and a few old- 
fashioned flowers Jordan had planted as a surprise 
for me. With tears in his eyes, he said: “Thet pipe 
an’ terbaccer y’ sent me Christmas wuz th’ fust 
present I got sence I wuz a kid, afore mother went.” 
For this he had given the flowers. 


CHAPTER THREE 


PLAYTIME 

T HE Doctor’s practice obliged him to buy a 
pair of horses. From his earliest boyhood he 
had loved horses, and had possessed the magic 
touch that brought their affection and control. 

New Year’s night came. It was a night of joy 
for us always. We usually elected to spend it to¬ 
gether and alone. We called it our wedding night, 
although we had been married in June. More often 
than not, the Doctor barely managed to be back 
by midnight. Our jolly, indigestible chafing-dish 
suppers lasted until a gray winter dawn filtered in 
through the closely-drawn curtains. They were 
nights of retrospect, nights of dreams. On that par¬ 
ticular New Year’s night, we decided to make the 
trip to the Long House a driving trip. To drive 
in leisurely fashion through the lovely Hudson val¬ 
ley, past Albany, through historic Bennington and 
beautiful Manchester, over the Green Mountain 
Trail to Rutland. Then we planned to drive on to 
quaint, old Middlebury, with its interesting little col¬ 
lege, to our own Vergennes, to the lake and home. 
Looking for just the right type of Surrey at the 

right price was endless fun. We left the hot city, 

23 


24 


WINGED SEEDS 


as we had planned, by the middle of June. We 
expected to spend the nights at hotels or inns, but 
to stop in woodsy places and by running brooks for 
al fresco luncheons. My mother gave us a delight¬ 
ful English tea and luncheon basket. So, with our 
suitcases, and with our black spaniel, Scotty, the 
Doctor’s shadow, we drove off into the glory of 
an early summer day. It was in the time of sing¬ 
ing, mating birds, in the time of freshest green, when 
leaves are young and new, when fields are sweet with 
wild flowers, when all the world seems dowered with 
youth and happiness. Everywhere green things 
were sprouting. Over it all hung the smell of roses 
and honeysuckle. 

When we arrived at the Long House, after four 
wholesome days of gypsying, we found everything 
in delightful order, a growing garden, a well-filled 
ice shed, an actually turning windmill, and neigh¬ 
bors and maids happy to greet us. We turned our 
tired horses out into Will Kimball’s big pasture. 
There we found two baby colts foaled in May. 
When we saw the little colts grazing beside their 
mothers, in that beautiful, hill-enclosed pasture, 
with its outlook over the Green Mountains, we 
looked at each other, the same thought in both our 
minds. Some day, somehow, we too must have a 
big, green pasture, with cows and calves, and 
mother mares with suckling baby colts. . . . 

The first thing we did, was to get two carpenters 
from Vergennes. They, together with Jordan and 


PLAYTIME 


25 


the Doctor, soon put up a simple horse barn at the 
farther end of our meadow. Next, a floating bar¬ 
rel dock came into existence in our sheltered cove. 
The dock was made of plank put together and at¬ 
tached to casks floating in the water beneath, one 
that could be taken apart and out of the water be¬ 
fore our return to New York. Meanwhile we had 
bought a tiny steam launch run by a kerosene motor 
engine. We re-named her the Otter. There were 
a goodly number of delayed meals while the Doctor 
got acquainted with the intricacies and the vagaries 
of her motor. 

At last we were ready to share our joys of the 
Long House and the beauty of our lake and our 
hills with family and friends in real earnest. While 
we had had occasional visitors from the very 
earliest days on our place, we now had a houseful 
all through the happy summers. They could swim 
and row, fish and tramp, and do all the happy out¬ 
door things so dear to those who understand. No 
one was happier to be with us than my young 
brother Marion, whom the Doctor had adopted as 
his. The Long House was never the same without 
his infectious gaiety, his unfailing willingness to 
help, his youthful breaks. 

We remained until the middle of September. 
What gay, busy days they were! Some of us had 
to sleep in the living room, in tents, in hammocks 
even. All this unconventionality and the simplicity 
of our life made for happiness and content. Our 


2 6 


WINGED SEEDS 


garden was a great success. So were the dock and 
the launch. All summer we had the never-ending 
pageant of amber and gold, and opal and green 
sunsets, of silver-white moonlight, of sparkling, 
myriad stars, and with it and over it all were cool¬ 
ing winds, bird songs, rustling, sun-drenched 
trees. We could always get fish, splendid bass, and 
pike, and pickerel, bull pout, and perch. We knew 
where delicious wild raspberries and black caps 
grew. Altogether we led the most delightful, rest¬ 
ful, health-giving life imaginable. 

Many amusing things happened. We were in 
the habit, for instance, of buying our chickens alive, 
and killing them ourselves. Incidentally, the na¬ 
tives were growing sophisticated as to their charges, 
despite our friendly intercourse. They evidently 
believed that business and friendship have nothing 
in common. They cheerfully charged city prices for 
their produce. To-day, knowing the farmers’ 
problems at first hand, I believe they were abso¬ 
lutely justified in so doing. Early one Sunday morn¬ 
ing, when we had quite a house party, I awoke to a 
great squawking and general uproar. Our chickens 
had escaped out of their coop, and were having a 
happy time wandering about, and digging for in¬ 
sects. Most of our household, in various sketchy 
costumes, joined in the futile chase amid gales of 
laughter. Finally the Doctor decided to make 
game birds of those poor domestic fowls, and shot 
them one by one. We enjoyed eating them fully 


PLAYTIME 


2 7; 

as much as if they had been killed in the more com¬ 
monplace way. 

Another time we watched a neighboring farmer, 
Fleming by name, and his hired man, both in their 
Sunday clothes, trying to get a hog out of his pen 
and into a crate for market. It was the proverbial 
pig pen, deep in mud. Also it had rained during 
the morning. The hog weighed four hundred 
pounds or thereabout. The two men ran round and 
round that muddy pen, and with them, always just 
out of reach, the poor, frightened beast. We sat 
on the fence, the Doctor and I, helpless with 
laughter. Meanwhile the men, getting dirtier by 
the minute and more furious, cursed and swore: 
“Damn y’, yer nothin’ but a hog, annyways”—un¬ 
til the air was blue. The poor hog led them more 
than an hour’s chase, before they got him, squeal¬ 
ing dismally, into the crate and loaded. No doubt, 
it was a good bit more amusing to watch than to 
live through. 

Still another day, we went to a decrepit-looking 
farmhouse in search of mahogany furniture. We 
were ushered into a dim, musty parlor. When our 
eyes got accustomed to the half-light, we saw most 
unusual and surprising pictures. Silver and brass 
coffin plates, surrounded with dried flowers and 
crape, hung carefully framed on the worn walls. 
There must have been at least a dozen, perhaps 
even more. Such cheerful things to live with! And 
when we left, we noticed that the horse block was 


28 


WINGED SEEDS 


a gravestone, laid on end. We hardly wondered 
that the poor wife looked like a mummy, stringy 
hair, colorless skin, expressionless eyes. Yet she 
must have been attractive, before the monotony of 
her life left its devastating mark upon her. It was 
good to get back into the brilliant sunshine, into 
the tonic air, into vital things. 

Ah, yes, those long-gone days were happy! 
There was just one fly that marred the beauty of 
our amber. This was the way of it. More farmers 
had followed Will Kimball’s example, and “aimed 
t’ git rid o’ shore acres.” A cottage settlement was 
growing up about us. There were a few families 
from Vergennes and the country towns near by, 
but mostly they were people from New York, 
Brooklyn, and still more distant cities. Rights of 
way seemed to be everywhere, particularly through 
our garden and past our porch. Our wonderful 
peace and solitude was broken in upon. 

The Doctor was called days and nights also. He 
had no wish to practice during our vacation days, 
nor did he care to break into the work of the vil¬ 
lage physicians, yet he was always glad and ready 
to respond, especially at night. I resented the 
whole situation tremendously. Perhaps it was only 
human for families from the cities to prefer a city 
doctor, particularly one who came immediately, 
without question or charge. I say I resented it. 
Certainly I did not, when there was real and urgent 
need. But the fact remained that there were a 


PLAYTIME 


2 9 


great many unnecessary demands upon the Doctor’s 
time and strength, and he needed every moment of 
his vacation. The exactions of his ever-increasing 
practice, the educational community work to which 
he frequently sacrificed precious hours of sleep, 
gave him barely any leisure during our long winters 
in New York. There were times when he was sum¬ 
moned by urgent telegrams to see patients in New 
York or at their country places. Besides all this, 
he was deep in the writing of a book of medical 
science. Our own household of family, friends, and 
helpers respected most minutely his hours of work. 
The cottagers, or campers, as they were called, had 
no such scruples. He was called when some silly 
woman had a fit of nerves, when she thought that 
possibly one of her children had a spoiled stomach, 
or her cook had cut her finger, and more along the 
same lines. No one of his own household would 
have dreamed of disturbing him for anything of 
the sort. 

At the end of the summer came a time when I 
“had a chance for glory and lost it,” as the Doctor 
said. Shortly before we planned to go back to town, 
he was trimming some dry and dead cedars in our 
woods. In some unaccountable way, for he was 
quite a woodsman in the handling of his axe, he cut 
his right hand very badly. I heard his call in a 
strange-sounding voice. I ran out to him, and 
found him seated on a stump, holding his right 
hand with his left. “Get my emergency case, and 


30 


WINGED SEEDS 


sterilize needles and the instruments I shall need. 
Bring hot water, bi-chloride solution, cotton and 
bandages, and then you may help me put in some 
stitches.” I turned pale at the thought. Making 
the necessary preparations was one thing. To take 
stitches in the Doctor’s own hand? I could not, 
and told him so. He looked at me as if he were 
ashamed. “Very well than, ’fraidcat, get David.” 

David Mannes, violinist, and his wife, the 
pianist, Clara Damrosch were old friends. They 
had a camp adjoining our woods. With them and 
their interesting little son, lived Clara’s mother, 
who had been a singer in her early life. She was 
the widow of Dr. Leopold Damrosch, who founded 
the New York Symphony Orchestra and the Ora¬ 
torio Society; who was the sponsor and interpreter 
of Wagner opera in America. Another beloved 
member of the Mannes household was Mrs. Dam- 
rosch’s sister, Miss Von Heimburg, called by us all, 
Tante Marie. One of the charming, attractive 
women, who somehow are beyond marriage, yet 
who mother all their world, whose very essence is 
sweetness, motherliness, selflessness. 

By the time David arrived, everything was 
ready for the operation. I threaded the catgut into 
the needle, the Doctor put it in place, and poor 
David, with his trembling, slender musician’s 
fingers, pushed it through. After we had taken 
seven stitches in this wise, the deed was done. We 
all three looked like death, and felt fairly sick. 


PLAYTIME 


3i 


The only cheerful one was the patient himself. 
However, neither of the men refused a drink of 
Scotch. It was many weeks before the Doctor had 
even partial use of his right hand, although it 
healed perfectly in time. It was many months be¬ 
fore he ceased reminding me of my lost chance for 
glory. 

We saw more and more of the lake on our fre¬ 
quent launch sails, and fell each day more in love 
with its evergreen shores, with the fertile valleys 
beyond, and its lichened rocks, that are geologically 
so tremendously ancient. We loved its picturesque 
inlets and its beautiful islands, its interesting fauna 
and flora; and more than all this, we had awakened 
to the deep significance of its farms and its farm¬ 
ing. We had become vitally interested in the farm 
operations going on all about us. Constantly we 
thought and we talked of the future. We wanted 
meadows and pastures and stock. We wanted to 
own and to develop a real farm. The very thought 
of so wonderful a thing, so pregnant a thing, 
thrilled us. 

There were a number of factors contributing 
toward this end. All creative work the Long 
House and its surrounding acres permitted had been 
accomplished. There was little left to do, but to 
enjoy the outdoor life. This was no longer suf¬ 
ficient to satisfy either the Doctor or me. The 
many campers, the rights of way, and, in conse¬ 
quence, the growing lack of peace and quiet, all 


32 


WINGED SEEDS 


these things were variously disturbing. They con¬ 
spired to awaken a steadily increasing desire for 
more land, for more worlds to conquer. In the last 
analysis, this was a quite natural and human rest¬ 
lessness, both physical and mental. 

We had learned how to play. What was in¬ 
finitely more important, we had learned how to 
work. We had come to see the tremendous inspira¬ 
tion of tilling the soil, the joy, the peace, the fasci¬ 
nation of farm life. 


CHAPTER FOUR 


INTERLUDES 

T HE Long House and the woods about it rang 
with laughter and song that blue and gold 
July Fourth. We were celebrating Independence 
Day. The house was filled with young people, 
eager, joyous, ready for anything. There were all 
manner of things, from swimming matches and bar¬ 
rel races to giant firecrackers and rockets, with a 
porch dance at night and a big bonfire. We made 
gallons of ice cream and harmless lemonade punch, 
and what seemed like tons of sandwiches. Eventu¬ 
ally we drove most of the girls and all the men 
out of the kitchen. They went off singing into the 
woods to cut branches for decoration. 

By night, the big porch was gaily festooned with 
greens. There was sufficient space for the dance, as 
the porch was seventy-five feet long and fully 
twelve feet wide. Swaying Chinese lanterns hung 
from ceiling and from cedar posts. More colored 
lights were hung in windows and among the sur¬ 
rounding trees. There was a slender young moon. 
The summer sky was luminous with stars. The air 
was soft and still, a beautiful, joyous night, a night 
made for youth and romance. By dark, the coun- 

33 


34 


WINGED SEEDS 


tryside was assembled. David Mannes offered to 
play for us for the dance. No one less would pos¬ 
sibly do. The Doctor, who danced as well as he 
did most other things, had promised to dance with 
the girls. They would not believe it, for no one of 
them imagined he would or could do anything quite 
so frivolous. Such dancing! Portland Fancy, Vir¬ 
ginia Reel, Quadrilles and Lancers, good, old- 
fashioned waltzes and polkas, all these were danced 
with the abandon of real and rare pleasure. 

It was a revelation to watch the wholesome fun 
and jollity, to see the marvelous disappearance of 
our sandwiches and other goodies. As foreground 
for the picture, we had the reflection of the big 
bonfire on the shore, and the many-colored rockets 
shooting up into the still air and falling, with a hiss¬ 
ing fiery rain, into the waters of the lake. 

Our big living room was shadow-filled and still. 
The more so with the sound of all the laughter 
and gaiety and music outdoors. With us, the Doctor 
and myself, by a smoldering hemlock fire sat one of 
our guests, who is to-day a very eminent authority 
in his chosen field. His childhood had been filled 
with many cares and few pleasures. His life at 
that time had not permitted much gaiety. More 
than all this, he had never known the real outdoors, 
the blessed open spaces. His growing love and ad¬ 
miration for trees and color, for the lake and 
for the hills was inarticulate, and doubly pa¬ 
thetic for that reason. Soft reflected light filtered 


INTERLUDES 


35 

in through open casement windows. Lamps had 
not been lighted. A long silence fell. Suddenly,— 
“Do you know, my friends, until to-night I have 
never known what was meant by embers. ‘To sit 
by the dying embers’ after-glow.’ It means home, 
the sacredness of life and love. I shall never for¬ 
get these days with you. They have brought into 
my life beauty and understanding.” 

Outside also, there had come an amazing silence. 
David was tuning his violin. We could see his left 
hand on the strings of his beloved fiddle. His 
strongly-lined face was in shadow. Then he played 
folk songs, spirited, gay, sad. Underneath each 
quaint old melody, no matter what its key, was the 
same somber, haunting quality that is the deep-un¬ 
dercurrent of all folklore, spelling the tragedy, the 
futility of life. There was not a sound when he 
ended. A lantern flickered, went out. The water, 
murmured, the trees rustled. Fireflies were all 
about. Goodnights were spoken quietly. Our 
guests vanished into the shadowy woods. We went 
about putting out the remaining lights, and left the 
night to scented silence and shimmering stars. 

It was a bumper hay crop, for there had been 
many snows in the winter, and much rain in June. 
The farmers had difficulty to get enough help to 
bring in their hay. There came a Saturday with 
promise of storm. The Doctor and our young 
people volunteered. They pitched hay all that hot, 
dull Saturday, and vowed they had never enjoyed 


WINGED SEEDS 


36 

themselves so much in all their lives. I can vouch 
for their appetites; if this contributed anything to 
the enjoyment. After this first trial, they repeated 
the same work a number of times, and became quite 
expert at the game, or so they imagined. At any 
rate, it helped out our neighbors, and brought about 
much good feeling. 

By the beginning of September our guests left 
us. We usually planned to have the two or three 
last weeks for our annual picnic, as we called it. 
We luxuriated in the thought of having all the days 
and the nights to ourselves. We went for long, 
over-night trips on the lake, taking with us our 
camping and fishing gear, our rifles, and our dog. 
A quick dip at dawn, with the sun coming up in 
all its glory of autumn color, was a joy. There 
was no one to watch us but our faithful spaniel. 
He sat on the deck of the launch, quivering with 
fear for our safety. Then came breakfast. How 
good it tasted in the wind and the sun! After 
dishes were dutifully washed, we hauled up our 
diminutive anchor, and started off somewhere, any¬ 
where into the beauty of the sparkling day. When¬ 
ever we saw a valley that looked promising, we 
landed and investigated, always with “our farm” 
at the back of our mind. We saw a goodly number 
of wonderful places, all adapted for farming, more 
or less. So far, we had come across nothing that 
was for sale. 

At the fall of early dusk, we anchored our launch 


INTERLUDES 


37 

at the entrance to one of the marshes, found in 
innumerable places on the Vermont shore. Mostly 
they are the heads of sleepy streams, with low, soft 
outlines, with swamp maples and water willows 
overhanging their shores. The tang and the color of 
autumn had already come to these quiet backwaters, 
inhabited only by water fowl, loon, heron, wild 
duck. It was for this we had trailed our little 
tender and brought our rifles. 

We poled our Peterborough into the tall reeds. 
How we loved the swish of the rushes against the 
side of our boat! Soon they closed over our heads, 
making a natural duck blind. We were one with 
the silence and the peace of the marsh, the gold and 
amethyst, the jade and amber of the sky. Neither 
the Doctor nor I cared greatly for the actual shoot¬ 
ing. It was much more the charm and the poetry 
of the place and hour, that fascinated us. One eve¬ 
ning I recall, we came pretty near being upset, when 
Scotty grew excited as a flock of teal flew fairly 
over us. The Doctor invariably carried something 
to read in his hunting clothes. “Watch out for 
my coat and that Sophocles!” It mattered little 
whether we got wet or mired; the book concerned 
him infinitely more. At the fall of night and 
through rising moonlight we sailed home to the 
Long House. 

Then again, we went for long driving trips, with 
our luncheon basket, our hammocks, and always 
Scotty. We rarely knew where we would go, still 


WINGED SEEDS 


38 

less, what we would do. There was in it the spirit 
of mystery, of exploration. We both adored it, this 
element of adventure, of uncertainty. And always 
at the back of everything, was the overwhelming 
desire for a farm, our farm, where we could work 
and grow things, which we could develop, and where 
we could create. We had come to feel that life in 
the country was the only life worth living. Some 
day, we would give up our medical work in New 
York, settle on our farm, breed horses, and grow 
apple trees, and do all the thousand thrilling, fas¬ 
cinating things possible on a farm. What wonder¬ 
ful books we would write in the snow-bound, silent 
winters! What wonderful music we would have! 
Oh, yes, of course we would have a Concert Grand 
piano, and a big pipe organ! By that time our 
dreaming became so excited that our horses went 
unheeded into the ditch by the roadside. A farmer 
ploughing in the field beyond stopped his team, 
leaned on his plough, and looked wonderingly at 
us. We came back to earth without mishap, and 
decided to drive instead of dream, seeing that we 
expected to get ourselves, Scotty, and our beasts 
home for the night. 

Shortly after this drive of dreams, we had to 
consult a local surveyor, in regard to our boundary 
line, about which there had been some discussion. 
The neighbor in question, was “th’ woman fr’m 
the city,” mentioned by Will Kimball at the time 
of our buying of his lake shore. She had been de- 


INTERLUDES 


39 


cidedly disappointed when she found someone had, 
so to speak, “beaten her to it.” Although she had 
some beautiful acres and had built a charming camp, 
she resented, as only a woman can, our possession 
of land she had considered practically hers. The 
surveyor recommended to us was a very discursive, 
yet interesting old man, who had surveyed all the 
country roundabout, and knew everybody within 
many miles. He knew the lake shore, and he knew 
the inland valleys. Eventually, it was because of 
this boundary dispute that we sold the Long House, 
and came to find the land that was the first pur¬ 
chase for our farm. It happened in this wise. 

After a fiery, gorgeous sunset, the wind started 
to blow, and before supper was over, the first 
equinoctial had struck us. It was splendid to see 
the wind-tossed, wildly swaying trees, to watch 
mighty rollers coming in, lashed by the big wind 
into huge fans of flying spray. The old surveyor 
stayed the night with us. Seated by our blazing 
fire, he related amusing and interesting things about 
the countryside, and its inhabitants. He told us 
about the Diamond Islands, two tiny islands three 
or four miles north of Basin Harbour. One is the 
property of Vermont, the second belongs to “York 
State.” The native of Vermont never by any chance 
says New York. Now, our County of Addison has 
local option, and Vergennes voted dry. All this 
happened before Prohibition was written into our 
Constitution. Promptly an enterprising citizen put 


40 


WINGED SEEDS 


up a shack on the New York Diamond Island and 
did a thriving business selling spirits, good, bad, 
and indifferent. 

The old man remembered the Civil War. He 
had helped escaping slaves through our township 
to Canada. He told us of the Ferrisburgh Town 
Clerk, Rowland Robinson, who grew apples, made 
butter, and wrote splendid stories of local life. 
Years later, when we had located at Ferrisburgh, we 
came to know well the interesting Robinson family. 
They were of Quaker descent, people of culture and 
education. 

We asked about land. He knew of some that he 
was sure we could get. It was the very thing we 
wanted, part virgin forest land, on the lake shore, 
part an old, run-down farm. Most of it had for 
years past been used only for pasture and woodlot. 
His eyes narrowed. He was a canny old man. I 
am sure he saw the possibility of doing a little 
business on his own account. We asked about the 
situation of this beautiful piece of land. He would 
‘‘show us to-morrow, if the wind’d go down. We 
could go in the launch.” 

The fire had burned down to gray ash. It was 
past midnight when we went to bed. The Doctor 
and I were reminded of the night long ago, when 
we slept under the stars, and saw the sun rise for 
the first time on land we owned. Those days were 
past. The enthusiasm of youth had simmered 
down to deep, placid content. We knew the time 


INTERLUDES 


4* 


had come for the realization of our great dream. 
It made us quiet. Big things had to be done. 
Great responsibility had to be met. We slept. To¬ 
morrow would come, all in its good time. We had 
learned to wait. 

The great wind blew itself to death by morning, 
and the sun rose on a radiant autumn day, with the 
air like wine, and everything glittery. The lake 
was rough, but we rather liked to feel that there 
was life in the waves beneath us. Directly break¬ 
fast was over, we started out, and sailed due north, 
past the Palisades, Westport, Rattlesnake Har¬ 
bour, Split Rock Light on the west or New York 
shore. We sailed fairly close to the east, the 
Vermont shore. It was very beautiful, rugged, 
deeply indented, with lichened rocks, with white 
birches, gray poplars, and towering evergreens 
growing close to the water. We passed the Dia¬ 
mond Islands and then turned northeast, sailing into 
a splendid, deep, landlocked bay, Keeler’s Bay, our 
map of the lake told us. We saw a quaint, old 
stone house on one side of the bay. The surveyor 
said this had once been an inn for soldiers, and was 
on the old Boston Post Road. It was now the 
property of a Catholic priest, Father Campeau, 
who rarely came there. 

We circled in and out of picturesque inlets, then 
anchored our launch in a delightful, sheltered little 
harbor, with a sandy beach below great, wonder¬ 
ful shelving rocks. These rocks, filled with gas- 


42 


WINGED SEEDS 


tropods and other ancient rock incrustations, made 
a natural dock. Scrambling up the slippery, mossy 
rocks, we found ourselves among splendid ever¬ 
greens, in truly virgin woods. Trees, trees were all 
about us, dim, silvery, silent. We were very quiet, 
but I know our hearts were beating fast. Old Mr. 
Benton spoke: “Wait until you see the big oak. It’s 
the biggest tree in this section. It stands alone in 
a clearing it has made for itself. Four men cannot 
span it. This used to be the old Graves’ farm. 
They used all this land for cow pasture.” A 
straggling cow path led us on. Ten minutes of 
rough walking and the clearing with its ancient, 
spreading oak burst upon us. Back and beyond it, 
as far as the eye could see, clustered trees and again 
trees. “We’ll never get it,” I whispered to the 
Doctor. “It’s too beautiful.” We rested under 
that majestic, giant white oak. It was the most 
marvelously symmetric tree we had ever seen. It 
stood alone in kingly dignity. Like all greatness, 
loneliness was its portion. 

We talked much of farming possibilities and prob¬ 
lems under the shelter of the mighty tree. Said 
old Mr. Benton: “You’ll get lots of fun out of it; 
you love the open. But never think to make money. 
Farms don’t bring much return. An independent 
living, sure. Heaps of work and trouble, the 
weather never right, the middleman getting all the 
profits.” And more in this wise. Nothing of the 
sort could daunt us. We had gone over it all count- 


INTERLUDES 


43 


less times; we had crossed our Rubicon. Come 
what might, it was the life we elected to live. And 
despite every adverse prophecy coming true in 
greater or less degree, we never regretted our great 
adventure. For adventure it surely proved to be, 
adventure in the most fascinating, most absorbing, 
most inspiring sense. And what, after all, does life 
mean? Is it not exploring one mystery after the 
other? Birth, love, work, death—all adventures, 
all mysteries, never to be solved in their entirety. 
And therein lies their lure. Always, a little beyond 
beckons the goal that is never quite reached. 

We had still to see the farm part of this beauti¬ 
ful piece of land. So we struggled on through un¬ 
derbrush, over fallen tree trunks, under trailing 
creepers, and came out into an old, neglected or¬ 
chard, with a view of the Adirondacks to the west, 
and of the Green Mountains to the east. The 
serene beauty of it all took our breath away. We 
met no one; we heard nothing but birds and squir¬ 
rels. Far in the distance, a train rumbled down the 
valley. I know we were very quiet with the awe of 
what we were about to undertake, with the respon¬ 
sibility it would mean, and all the rest of it. Our 
old guide did the talking and enjoyed it. He told 
us whom to see, how to go about buying the land. 
He offered to do it for us. We filled our pockets 
with ripe apples that were going to waste on the 
ground, took a last look at the hills bathed in the 
mellow autumn sun, and walked, or rather 


44 


WINGED SEEDS 


struggled, back through more lovely woods to the 
clearing, where stood the guardian spirit of it all, 
the big white oak. We returned to our tender and 
the launch, and at last home to the Long House 
with joy and wonder in our hearts, and dreams in 
our eyes. 

Thus was born the ideal which brought to us our 
real life. Walter Clark, too, had attained success, 
and had bought a beautiful studio apartment, west 
of Central Park, in the upper Sixties, where he 
lived and worked among friends, among them 
James Montgomery Flagg, and John Wolcott 
Adams. He had attained a son. He, who so loved 
adventuring, had entered into the greatest adven¬ 
ture of all, the mystery of death. 

Another spring came with all its sweet hope and 
promise. The Big Oak was ours. Our former 
neighbor had her wish. She had bought the Long 
House and our eight acres of woods and meadow, 
possession to be given the following October. Our 
last summer on the old place proved to be as happy 
as all the others that went before. There was a 
background of soberness and a pang of regret. 
After all, here was a part of our life that was ended. 
It had been a beautiful and enlightening part, rich 
in growth. With our Long House days success had 
come, and a fuller life, a deeper understanding and 
sympathy for all things human. 


CHAPTER FIVE 


PLANS AND DREAMS 

D URING those last weeks of our stay at the 
Long House, we sailed up to our farm a num¬ 
ber of times, growing each day more and more en¬ 
thusiastic about its splendid situation and its op¬ 
portunities. Our land was between two high roads, 
right in the midst of good Vermont farming coun¬ 
try. We owned a beautiful valley, ringed with 
blue hills on three sides, and on the fourth was our 
beloved lake. Could anything be more perfect? 

One day late in September we took our house 
party of four with us, lunch baskets and all. With 
us was Charles A. Platt, artist and architect. Some 
time before this, the Doctor and I had been site¬ 
hunting; that is, we looked for the place best suited 
for the new house. It was to be built of granite, 
out of the rocks that formed the backbone and the 
lake shore of our farm. By this time, the adven¬ 
ture of the house was fully planned by the Doctor. 
“Black magic man, man of dreams,” as one of his 
friends called him. The house was to be Colonial, 
pure New England Colonial, gray stone, white trim¬ 
mings, low ceilings, small-paned windows, portico. 
His ever restless, ever creative mind, the wonderful 

45 


WINGED SEEDS 


4 6 

quickness and surety with which he saw and lit upon 
the salient point, made my head spin. 

My choice was a height of land beyond and to the 
southwest of the Big Oak, at a distance from the 
water, it is true, but giving a wondrous, wide sweep 
over the lake and the Adirondacks. The Doctor’s 
choice was practically on the lake shore, high up 
on the rocks, in a big grove of pines, facing directly 
north, and so placed that two beautiful points en¬ 
closed the site with protecting arms. We took Mr. 
Platt through our woodland and over the farm land. 
He was completely enraptured with the startling 
beauty of it all. Nothing was said to him about our 
choice of a site for the house. We had marked both 
places with stones. His choice came within a few 
feet of the Doctor’s. I had lost. 

We staked it all out carefully, and then the two 
men went into excited, ecstatic planning. A good 
deal of it was so much Greek to me. The two 
artists, for the Doctor’s almost pagan love of 
beauty was second only to his passion for healing, 
had the time of their lives. We common mortals 
made a fire on the big, shelving rocks, and got the 
picnic luncheon ready. They paid no heed to our 
repeated calls. When I scrambled up to them, they 
were deep in proportion of doors and windows, 
colonial drops and chimney breasts, spindle balus¬ 
trades and other delightful, artistic things. Never¬ 
theless they enjoyed our meal in the open, under 
God’s shining sky and lofty pines. Mr. Platt, 


PLANS AND DREAMS 


47; 


whose professional work takes him to beautiful 
places all over these United States, told us that we 
had acquired one of the loveliest and most romantic 
parcels of land he had ever seen. His own country 
place was at beautiful Cornish, in an artists’ and 
writers’ colony, among whom were St. Gaudens, 
Maxfield Parrish, Norman Hapgood, Herbert 
Croly and others of note. “Yes,” he said, “Cornish 
and Windsor are very lovely, but not like this.” 

Another week saw the keys of the Long House 
in the new owner’s hands, saw us in New York, 
hard at work, full of renewed energy and quiet con¬ 
tent. Before going home, we had found a neigh¬ 
bor in whose care we left Big Oak Farm, as we 
had already christened it. The caretaker was to 
post “No Trespass” signs on lake shore, in woods, 
and in meadows. Our land was a noted and much 
liked hunting and fishing place. We feared the 
carelessness of hunters and camp fires. My heart 
was in my mouth when I thought of fire in our 
woods. Also our neighbor was to plough the old 
orchard and all the meadow land possible, for agri¬ 
cultural purposes. We longed for the time to come, 
when we could look after our farm ourselves. 

We decided to spend the following summer in 
travel abroad. It would be our last chance, we fully 
realized, for many years to come. Besides, we did 
not feel quite ready to begin putting up farmhouse 
and barns, our own dwelling with all its attendant 
lesser buildings, ice house, dock, and what not. 


48 


WINGED SEEDS 


We thoroughly enjoyed our leisurely three 
months in London and in the English Cathedral 
towns and Lake country. Yet, despite the beauty of 
its old civilization, its centuries of culture, with all 
its background of fascinating historical interest, we 
were restless. We wanted to get at the vital thing, 
the thing that had come to be the pivot upon which 
our thoughts turned, our farm. We were strangely 
homesick for our lake and our hills. 

Autumn came; and winter. Mr. Platt had his 
complex, beautifully-drawn blue prints ready and 
waiting for suggestions on our return. Poor, long- 
suffering men I The Doctor and the artist made 
praiseworthy efforts to make clear to me those 
enigmas of careful, drawn-to-scale plans. I spent 
hours at Mr. Platt’s interesting and artistic studios. 
I hate to confess that, while I had a delightful time, 
north and south elevations, and so on, meant little 
to me. A charming water color Mr. Platt had 
made, showing the house with lawns and a drive 
and turn-around, was indeed lovely. Yet I saw 
nothing but deep woods where that drive was sup¬ 
posed to be. I fear I was more troubled at the 
thought of the towering pines which would have to 
be destroyed, than happy with what seemed like a 
dream of a perfectly-proportioned, simple, and dig¬ 
nified home in its beautiful setting of green. 

What I wanted was a big kitchen, many cup¬ 
boards, a big living room and library, and light and 
sun everywhere. In town there’s so little light, and 


PLANS AND DREAMS 


49 


the Long House with its wide porch and its many 
trees had always been full of shadows. Yes, even 
the laundry and cellar must have light. I wanted 
a linen room, and an old-fashioned flower garden. 
I cared little whether columns were fluted or plain, 
for Kewanee or other water systems, for propor¬ 
tions worked out to the last quarter inch, or for 
all the rest of their technical and artistic details. 
But these details were a matter of life and death 
to the Doctor and to Mr. Platt. We had many 
and heated arguments. To tell the truth, we rather 
enjoyed these discussions, all three. I wanted big 
windows, and high-ceilinged rooms. Right there 
we came to an impasse. In the end, we agreed to 
disagree about these things, so important in the 
eyes of both men. Anything I wished, so long as 
the ceiling and the windows were as they must be! 
I neither understood nor visualized what the “little 
things I wished” would cost, running water for in¬ 
stance, and a bathroom in the farmhouse. Wells 
could be dug, there was all of Lake Champlain. I 
haci worlds to learn. I awoke to all these complex 
problems later on. 

As we got deeper and deeper into the farming 
problems, we came to realize that to be a farmer 
meant more than we had ever dreamed could be 
possible. One should have a working knowledge of 
chemistry, physics, be a veterinary, an engineer and 
bridge builder, a mechanic, a carpenter and mason, 
know about the many diverse branches of husbandry 


WINGED SEEDS 


50 

and animals, and a thousand other things equally 
important. Each farm industry, and there are 
many, is or ought to be an exact science. Each 
grain, for instance, requires exact knowledge of a 
number of details peculiar to itself. Each type of 
farm animal has its own peculiarity of physiology, 
its own peculiar psychology. Perhaps as important 
as any one of these things is the necessity for being 
a financier. Last, but not least, there is need of 
tremendous patience and tact in dealing with the 
human element, the hired men and women. In other 
words, to be a farmer, in the real and fullest sense 
of the word, means to be a man of sense and of 
work, a man of science and of vision. 

The first of June came at last. We stopped at 
the Stevens House, a dear little old-fashioned hotel 
in Vergennes. Mr. and Mrs. Gaines, the pro¬ 
prietors, treated their guests like a big family. 
They helped to put us in the way of many things 
we needed to know. They told us of the most 
trustworthy workmen to be found locally. First of 
all, we looked for the right man to take the con¬ 
tract of building for us. The Doctor, as always, 
had his community ideal before him. He wanted 
to patronize “home talent,” in as far as it was pos¬ 
sible so to do. Therefore the work of building 
should be done by local workmen. This was at the 
same time less expensive and then, too, right from 
the start, it brought us into close touch with the 


PLANS AND DREAMS 


5i 

people, among whom we expected some day to make 
our permanent home. 

We found a practical and experienced contractor 
and builder, who worked with his men as well as 
directed them. He was as honest as his limited 
intelligence permitted him to be. We never could 
count with any degree of certainty upon the out¬ 
come of anything. Here again, entered the element 
of mystery and adventure. For the Doctor, this 
gave a peculiar zest to whatever happened. I 
should have preferred greater exactness. We 
handed over the precious blue prints to our builder, 
and took him out to get the lay of the land. He 
“hed hunted an’ fished on thet point morn once,” he 
told us. “Knew it all th’ way through.” However, 
he was fairly staggered by our plans, and was glad 
the Doctor promised to stand back of him from the 
beginning to the end. 

Meanwhile we had hired two saddle horses, for 
we planned to ride out to the farm every day and 
to get acquainted with its many problems. It was a 
rarely beautiful summer, and the eight-mile ride to 
and from Vergennes was lovely. They were eight 
miles of fairly bad clay road. But at the same time 
they were beautiful miles of rolling hill and fertile 
valley. Always we rode in view of fold upon fold 
of misty hills, of picturesque, winding streams, with 
the big, blue lake in the distance. We rode past 
prosperous, well-tilled farms, past tumble-down, 
neglected ones. Never once did we come across a 


52 


WINGED SEEDS 


beggar, never once did we see a hungry-looking, 
pale child. We saw old, pre-Revolutionary gray 
stone or red brick, white-trimmed farmhouses, with 
charming fanlights and admirably-proportioned 
doorways. We rode through wooded lanes and 
deep woods roads, over stony, old-time causeways. 
Every mile of the way was beautiful, interesting, 
worth while. 

On these daily rides we became acquainted with 
the children, and eventually were accepted by their 
elders. The Vermonter is restrained, not easily 
won. It is difficult to make friends with him, but 
once find the way to his heart, get him to under¬ 
stand your wish for friendship, your willingness to 
work as he works, have him realize your love for 
his native state, and he is yours. None is second to 
him in hospitality, in neighborliness. He expects 
you to watch out in your bargaining, as he expects 
to watch out for himself. Nothing wins his re¬ 
spect and his liking so quickly as meeting you on 
an equal ground of shrewdness and common 
sense. 

As the long, happy days of the summer wore on, 
we became daily better acquainted with our land, 
its many possibilities, its many problems. Each day 
brought its dreams and its plans. We watched the 
farmers at their haying; hard, grueling hard work. 
Yet every man to whom we spoke said he liked “t’ 
hay it better’n most annything else. Thet an’ 
ploughin’ in th’ fall o’ th’ year.” To this day it is 


PLANS AND DREAMS 


53 

not quite clear to me why the men prefer these two 
seemingly so arduous jobs. 

Arrangements were being made for the blasting, 
which marked the beginning of our home building; 
the blasting and the cutting down of many big pines. 
The entire lake shore and much of the woodland 
bordering it was a type of granite, hard, gray, and 
very beautiful. The foundation for our house had 
therefore to be blasted out of the live rock. The 
rock gained in this wise was to be used in the cellars 
and for the building of the outside walls. By the 
end of July all was in readiness. Forty big pines 
were felled. I wept to see them go down. Trees 
have souls, I think. Whoever has heard their sob¬ 
bing moan as the trunk is severed from the roots 
cannot but believe it. 

At the south end of our orchard, toward the hills, 
was part of a stone foundation in fairly good con¬ 
dition, and the cellar of an old house. On this 
foundation we decided to build our farmhouse. 
With the old orchard as a nucleus, we planned to 
plant more apple trees, as many as possible, without 
undue crowding. Trees, like humans, do not thrive 
when they must live and breathe too closely herded. 
We found a man, old Ben Bailey, who had some 
experience with fruit trees. He was another like 
Will Jordan of our Long House days, whose years 
of drink had left their aging mark. Old Ben, as he 
was called by all the countryside, could turn his hand 
to anything and everything on a farm and in the 


54 


WINGED SEEDS 


open. He was weatherwise and woodswise, and 
when not in the thrall of drink, was absolutely de¬ 
pendable. We grew to be very fond of him, and I 
know he would have gone through fire and water 
for me, had I asked it. 

Ben cut down trees that were too far gone to 
save, cut off dead limbs, and trimmed the rest. 
He scraped the bark to get rid of burrowing insects, 
and did everything possible to make up for the 
neglect of the past years. With this work we 
helped as much as we could; and so began our first 
real work with our own hands on our farm. Deep 
in our hearts, we felt, too, that by helping the old 
apple trees to renewed energy and vigor we were 
making amends for the death of the great pines, 
whose life had been given for the new life of our 
home. 

How intensely we enjoyed the long days in the 
open! We turned our horses out to graze and we 
wandered, free as clouds in the sky, finding each 
day new and interesting things and places. We 
found more and more splendid trees; oaks, beeches, 
maples, basswood, birches, poplars, and every type 
of resinous, odorous evergreens. We discovered 
uncounted kinds of wild flowers, although at this 
high tide of summer there were comparatively few 
in bloom. There were ladies’ slipper, Indian pipe, 
anemone, arethusa, adders’ tongue, wild ginger, 
Jack-in-the-pulpit, trillium, and Canada lily, and a 
host of others. We found masses of wilding ferns 


PLANS AND DREAMS 


55 


In the loveliest ravine imaginable. It immediately 
received its name, the Fernway. There were dainty 
maidenhair and maidenhair spleenwort with their 
glossy black stems, cinnamon fern, polypodium, 
royal fern, walking fern, that rare variety which 
propagates by burying its little pointed head in the 
surrounding moss. All these and more, we recog¬ 
nized. But there were many strangers whose 
names and habits we would have to learn. How 
like fairy gardens must these woods be in spring! 
Some day we would see the slow awakening of life 
after winter’s sleep. We would hear the song of 
birds and waters after winter silence. Some day 
we would see it, would hear it all. We were being 
born again. It was good to be alive, good to look 
forward to years of splendid promise. Life would 
always hold dreams for us. 


CHAPTER SIX 


JOYS AND PROBLEMS 

T HERE were gray days too; days of sultry heat 
and threatening cloud; days when trailing 
mist hung low over the hills, and the smiling blue 
lake looked green and angry; days when our horses 
walked every step of the way from Vergennes to 
the farm, and yet were covered with lather when 
we slipped out of our saddles. We let them graze 
and cool off, before we led them to the lake for a 
drink, and a dip if they were so minded. 

Gray days have a charm all their own. It is rest¬ 
ful for eyes and spirit to get a change of perspec¬ 
tive, to have the bright glare of sun and dazzling 
sky toned down to soft light and somber, quiet gray. 
The passion of growth seems momentarily arrested. 
There is a sense of calm, of waiting. Nature is 
gathering strength for a storm, for wind, for much- 
needed rain. We loved it all, vivid, radiant days, 
dull, leaden ones, thunder and lightning, wind and 
rain. 

Among the many charming wild things that 
flourished on our farm, were a number of noxious 
weeds. However pleasing to the eye, beautiful in 
form and color of leaf and flower they may be, they 

56 


57 


JOYS AND PROBLEMS 

are unfortunately a pest on land needed for agri¬ 
culture. The clearing where the Big Oak stood was 
covered with a delicate little, starry wild thing that 
reminded one of a French marigold. It was hawk- 
weed, sometimes called wild marigold. The farm¬ 
ers hereabout call it by a name that is descriptive 
of their hatred for it, Devil’s paintbrush. It grows 
in wreaths, fairly carpeting the ground with a soft, 
coppery-red above, and an intricate network of 
tough green and roots below. It is a lovely thing, 
odorous, decorative, with filmy, gossamer seeds, like 
the dandelion, which the wind carries everywhere. 

On one leaden August day the Doctor and I be¬ 
gan to clear our land of the pest, pulling it out root 
and all, wherever possible. We had with us a keg 
of salt on a wheelbarrow, to kill out what we could 
not uproot. It was hot work, but we were doing 
something real, we were starting the reclamation of 
our farm, with our four hands. This was farming. 
About us was color, light, peace. The wind brought 
to us dull thuds of chisel and hammer at work on 
our foundation. LeBoeuf, our builder, was about 
ready to fire the first big blast that evening, at quit¬ 
ting time. We were glad when noon came to 
straighten our aching backs, to take our bathing 
suits, and go over to the sandy beach, where we 
had landed that memorable day in September with 
the old surveyor. 

Our swim was a joy. There is a tonic quality in 
the water of Lake Champlain, due, we imagined, to 


WINGED SEEDS 


5 8 

the mountain springs that feed it. After dinner, 
which we brought with us from the hotel, we made 
tea over a smoky wood fire. Tea, with a tang of 
wood smoke, flavored by the wind in the pines! 
For an hour we watched the men working among 
the rocks and talked with them. Then we went 
back resignedly to our weed-pulling for the rest of 
the day. There were quantities of wild carrot, or 
Queen Anne’s lace, which, eventually, we would have 
to uproot. Its graceful, lacy white flower heads 
nodded and swayed charmingly in every breeze. 
Worst of all, there was chicory, blue as the sunny 
sky, and as beautiful. We were determined to get 
rid of them all before seed-pod time, and the scat¬ 
tering of myriad additional seeds against future 
flowering. 

At five we saddled our mounts and rode off 
toward Vergennes. Shortly before the time ap¬ 
pointed, we stopped and listened for the blast. The 
Doctor dismounted and stood at our horses’ heads. 
We held our breath. Promptly, almost to the sec¬ 
ond, the thing went off, with a deafening noise, like 
a hundred cannon. If noise meant anything, there 
must, by this, be a fairly deep gash in the granite 
rock. What with the terrific blast and low, growling 
thunder in the west, our beasts were very nervous. 
The storm, that had been threatening all day, burst 
with a roar of wind and rain, just as we reached 
the outskirts of the town. We cantered up to the 
Stevens House barn with water running in streams 


JOYS AND PROBLEMS 59 

from us and from our horses. It was a blessed 
relief after the heat of the day. The Doctor helped 
to look after the tired, nervous beasts. Only after 
that was done, did we get into dry things. We were 
deliciously tired, and hungry. Our simple supper 
tasted like the honey of Hymettus. We slept the 
sleep of the blest, with rain thundering on the porch 
roof outside our windows. 

The next morning it was raining hard. Building 
operations always stop on days of storm, we knew. 
To tell the truth, although we would not acknowl¬ 
edge it to each other, we were a bit stiff, and glad 
to have a day to rest and to read. We saw our 
builder, who lived in Vergennes. He said that the 
two blasts had made a tremendous hole in the rock. 
Stone had been thrown as far as the Big Oak clear¬ 
ing. “Ye sh’d a’ seen it. It wuz fine,” he said. 
“Like a mess o’ fireworks.” 

It was the first time we noticed this use of the 
word “mess.” Later we grew quite accustomed to 
“a mess o’ children,” as well as a “mess o’ corn 
or peas.” There are a good many strong, old Saxon 
words in daily use hereabout. For instance, no one 
speaks of the weight of a thing. It is the “heft” 
of it. One of the picturesque old causeways is 
called the “Slang Bridge.” The narrow stream 
flowing peacefully beneath, is the “Slang.” 

A telegram was handed to us. “Oh, dear,” I 
thought, “some one of his patients needs the 


6o 


WINGED SEEDS 


Doctor.” The message was this: “Your spaniel 
arrives to-night six p.m. Vergennes.” So, before 
six, after a delightful day of quiet rain, at peace 
with our books and the world, we wended our sur¬ 
prised and wondering way to the station, a mile out 
of the little town. The train arrived on time. Out 
of the baggage car was handed a crate with a list¬ 
less black dog, crouched disconsolately, as far out 
of the way of prying eyes as the small space of his 
wooden prison permitted. He was dead with fa¬ 
tigue, unhappy as a lonely dog can be. Suddenly, 
he awoke to the sound of the Doctor’s voice. With 
a wild howl of joy, he hurled himself into the air, 
crate and all. We got him out of his prison with 
some trouble, he was so excited, and he actually 
cried with joy. I think we felt rather upset our¬ 
selves. Attached to his collar was a note telling us 
that “the dog was sick, would not eat, howled day 
and night.” Therefore the telegram and dog had 
been dispatched to us. 

We were all three happy. We had missed each 
other. Together we walked back into a gorgeous 
sunset of royal purple and coppery gold, with 
a wondrous double rainbow bridging the sky. 
Luckily, Mrs. Gaines of the hotel liked dogs. 
Scotty’s manners were irreproachable, although he 
made friends with no one. No one could touch him, 
except, perhaps, a little child. After a thorough 
cleaning-up, of which he stood in decided need, we 
settled down happily for the night. Scotty lay down 


JOYS AND PROBLEMS 61 

between the two beds, where we could not escape 
him again. 

The colorful sunset, followed by glittering stars 
in a bright, velvet sky, with a breeze from the north, 
presaged fine weather for the morrow. In the 
morning, all the world was washed in deep, fathom¬ 
less blue and shining gold. The air had the inde¬ 
scribable smell of wet earth and growing green 
things, washed clean by wind and rain. There was 
in it a pure, transparent quality, as if cobwebs and 
shadows, veils upon veils, had been swept away. It 
was a day when “yokes are easy and burthens are 
light.” 

We set out for the lake with Scotty trotting con¬ 
tentedly between us. Before long we cantered our 
horses. Then the poor spaniel’s troubles began. 
Soon his tongue hung out, and he panted fearfully. 
The Doctor slid out of his saddle, gathered up the 
dog in his arms, and in this way we rode happily out 
to the lake. 

In the foundation on the lake shore, there was a 
huge gash in the rock. Broken stone was lying 
about everywhere, all the way from little pebbles 
to great, jagged rocks. It looked like death and 
destruction. They were preparing for new blasts. 
The scarring of the fair, peaceful woods seemed 
like desecration, as bad as the cutting down of the 
pines. This was the one part of our building that 
we both hated. Yet no bridge can be constructed, 
no church can be built without clamor and chaos. It 


6 2 


WINGED SEEDS 


is a lesson man has learned from nature. Our most 
beautiful islands are the results of tremendous up¬ 
heavals; our great mountains are but scars nature 
has made on the earth. What are noble sheets of 
water like Lake Champlain but survivals and results 
of elemental changes in the earth’s surface? 

Another ten days, our builder hoped, would see 
the blasting over, and the construction of the foun¬ 
dation walls begun. We went back for the remain¬ 
der of the morning to our weed-pulling in the clear¬ 
ing. Scotty looked longingly at leaping squirrels 
and chipmunks, but dared not leave us long enough 
to pursue them. After our nooning, we decided to 
go in the builder’s skiff for an exploring tour on the 
lake. 

The Doctor gave Scotty a lecture on the advis¬ 
ability of sitting still in the boat and on the middle 
of the seat. This involved one of the many sub¬ 
jects about which we had agreed to disagree. I 
believe that dogs have intelligence and understand 
much. They know the tone of a beloved voice, the 
expression of a face they adore. But I cannot feel 
that they understand speech in our sense. However 
that may be, after a dip in the lake, dripping with 
water from every shining, curly hair, he hopped on 
to the seat designated by the Doctor, and sat there 
like a statue of a dog, immovable, watching us, the 
water, the sky, the shore, wrinkling his sensitive, 
rubbery nostrils at all the interesting sights and 
smells. 


JOYS AND PROBLEMS 63 

Naturally we were familiar with the lake south 
of us toward Basin Harbour on the east and West- 
port on the west. Therefore we paddled north. 
After getting out of Long Point Bay, we rowed due 
north toward Split Rock Light, a picturesque light¬ 
house and tower on the nearer New York shore. It 
is called Split Rock Light on account of a strange 
arch-like formation under which there is always 
restless water, even on a day of calm. The storm 
of the day before had so rarefied the atmosphere 
that the Adirondack peaks stood out against the 
clear background of sky like etchings on a painted 
wall, so deeply blue that they seemed black. 

We paddled close to the Diamond Islands. Like 
many things in this deceiving world, they had little 
beauty and less romance when seen from close by. 
Wind-torn trees, shale rock shores, they were noth¬ 
ing more. They needed the haze of distance and 
the glamour of romance to seem interesting. We 
turned northeast, and after a row of four miles or 
thereabout, came to another and larger island, beau¬ 
tifully wooded, interesting in outline of shelving, 
pebbly, and sandy shore. This was Gardiner’s 
Island, we discovered later. The lake here was 
very shallow, a sand and rock reef, accordingly 
marked by a government stake. “Surely,” said the 
Doctor, “this must be a wondrous place for night 
spearing and for duck hunting.” Rowing slowly, so 
as to avoid grounding our light and borrowed boat, 
we swished along between queerly-jointed,, snaky 


WINGED SEEDS 


6 4 

seaweeds and tall, reedy rushes, and found ourselves 
at the entrance to another one of the quiet, serene 
backwaters. We did not then know that this was 
Lewis Creek. We paddled slowly between the most 
charming banks imaginable, the stream winding in 
and out dreamily as is the wont of sleepy creeks. 
The banks were overgrown with soft maples and 
silver birches, with water willows and oaks, with 
here and there great shagbarks and hazel nut trees ; 
ali overhanging the water protectingly. They seemed 
to welcome and to beckon us in friendly fashion, 
like evergreen woods in winter, when they are 
heavy-laden with snow. Bordering the creek was 
pasture land, placid, peaceful, with cows and horses 
contentedly grazing. Overhead, the clouds were 
traveling as lazily as the winding stream. Beyond, 
far beyond, were green hills, blue hills folded in 
mystery. The silence of it all, its peace sank deep 
into our souls. 

The westering sun awoke us at last to the neces¬ 
sity for returning home. We turned about reluc¬ 
tantly, and now, added to everything else, came the 
beauty of sunset time. Veils of pale gold, veils of 
soft red and mauve and pearl and opal changed 
from moment to moment, growing lovelier, softer, 
more iridescent as we came from out the shelter 
of the stream with its enfolding trees into the 
marshy rushes. Suddenly we found ourselves float¬ 
ing into the broad lake. Like the burst of a great 
chord of splendid music was that sudden view of the 



When Spring Comes to Lewis Creek and the Ancient Willow. 








JOYS AND PROBLEMS 65 

lake, with the high peaks of the Adirondacks flam¬ 
ing in sunset glory. We were blinded with its un¬ 
earthly beauty and grandeur. It was one of the 
sights that one treasures, that comes back in after 
years, like the poignant fragrance marking a time 
of joy or of grief. 

And so we came through the pageant of evening 
glory into our own bay and home to find no dis¬ 
turbing sound of hammer and chisel, nothing but the 
quiet dusk and low bird calls. Our horses came 
whinnying to meet us, glad to be saddled and 
mounted. Darkness descended before we arrived 
at Vergennes. We were alone in a world of 
shadowy distances and fragrant silence. Our 
horses’ hoofs made no sound on the soft dirt road. 
It was like a dream of finding oneself in an ancient 
magician’s audience hall, with velvet-hung walls and 
ceiling studded with silver stars. 


CHAPTER SEVEN 


GRANITE WALLS AND ROMANCE 

S COTTY and I had a lonely week, while the 
Doctor was away on a consultation trip. We 
went out to the farm only once. They were getting 
on splendidly with the blasting and expected to sur¬ 
prise the Doctor on his return by having that part 
of the job completed. At the same time the old 
foundation and cellar on which we intended building 
our farmhouse was in process of repair. Our 
builder would also have this job ready against the 
Doctor’s return. It was quite wonderful how he 
had gained the confidence and respect and the liking 
of the workmen. To a man, they did their utmost 
to surprise “the Doc,” and to show him how well 
and how faithfully they worked in his absence. 
During the past weeks he had cared for several of 
the men, and had given good advice to as many 
more. Already the village doctors were getting 
into the habit of asking his help in complicated cases. 
One of them said to me: “I got more out of the 
Doctor’s talk and illustrations the other night, than 
I learned in a year’s college course.” 

Meanwhile I had the time to do some necessary 

reading along agricultural lines. Among other 

66 


GRANITE WALLS AND ROMANCE 67 

things, I studied vegetable growing, flower culture, 
poultry raising and its care, soil culture, and crop 
rotation. We had gathered together during the 
past winter a good deal of literature on pomology. 
Pomology I read and studied—and marveled. 
The labor involved in acquiring even a working 
knowledge of what seemed absolutely necessary for 
intelligent supervision, still more for personal en¬ 
deavor, was stupendous. There are hundreds of 
varieties of apples, each with its own characteris¬ 
tics of growth, form, color, needs. There are 
dozens of insect pests, vegetable and animal, that 
must be fought in various ways, by poison stomach 
and contact sprays, by digging out of the bark, even 
out of the heartwood of the young trees. I studied 
interpollination, grafting methods, soil fertility, 
pruning, picking and packing devices, shipping and 
storage, and more along the same lines. Each sub¬ 
ject was a tremendous study in itself, fascinating, 
absorbing. I longed for the time to come, when we 
could begin to work out practically all these exact 
scientific, wordy theories. The time would come 
next spring, for we intended ordering sapling fruit 
trees from the nursery before our return to New 
York in late September. 

I fairly jumped when a knock sounded at the 
door. A man to see me, sent by our builder at the 
lake. I wondered. “Th’ ol’ man tol’ me t’ tell ye 
thet yer hosses an’t nowhar t’ be faoun’. We ben a’ 
lookin’ all araoun’. An’t no un a seen ’em.” Here 


68 


WINGED SEEDS 


was strange news. I wished the Doctor had been 
here to cope with this emergency in his usual undis¬ 
turbed, calm way. I had sent the two saddle mares 
out to the farm to graze, for a holiday, during the 
Doctor’s absence. Certainly they could not have 
disappeared into thin air during the night. I was 
not long left in doubt. 

During supper in the pleasant, scrupulously clean 
dining room, with a vase of flowers on each table, 
Mr. Gaines came in to speak to me. Two young 
people were in the parlor waiting to see me. “I got 
a hunch, it’s about yer horses,” he volunteered. 
Well, I devoutly hoped his hunch was right. 

The parlor of the old Stevens House was a 
quaint, over-furnished, big room. It was a queer 
mixture of mid-Victorian, ornate walnut and mar¬ 
ble-topped tables, simple mahogany chairs and set¬ 
tees, whatnots and mirrors. There was an old, 
square piano with a cracked sounding board, and 
keys that stuck; upholstered Morris chairs and rock¬ 
ers with crocheted doilies pinned to the resting place 
for tired heads. There were growing things, green 
ferns and scarlet geraniums in bloom. The room 
had an air of home and comfort, as if it had been 
lived in, as if things had happened there. It is a 
curious fact, that human life and happenings leave 
an essence, a something intangible, unexplained, like 
a remembered fragrance. 

My unexpected guests rose nervously, as I en¬ 
tered. The girl, for she could not have been more 


GRANITE WALLS AND ROMANCE 69 

than seventeen or eighteen, had a sweet, innocent 
face. She wore a plain, home-cut blue gingham 
dress that deepened the blue of her eyes: eyes that 
reminded me of cornflowers in French wheatfields. 
The man, hardly more than a boy, stood twisting 
his worn straw hat round and round. I made them 
sit down and asked them to tell me all about it. I 
had noticed very shiny, new-looking plain gold bands 
on the ring fingers of each frightened young hand. 
“Is it about my horses?” I asked. The girl burst 
into tears and the boy stuttered and stammered. 
After patient questioning, I finally got the story. 
To tell the shameful truth, I was delighted with 
them. Naturally, I did not dare to let them see it. 
“Oh, dear, what fun it will be telling the Doctor!” 

Their story was old as the eternal hills. Yet, as 
always, it was everlastingly new to the young lovers 
—as Heine describes so vividly: “Es ist eine alte 
Geschichte.” Like all the lovers of all the world, 
none had ever loved more dearly than they two; 
none had ever lived through more troublous times. 
They knew what they had done was wrong, terribly 
wrong. They would do whatever I thought right to 
make amends. What had happened was this. They 
were neighbors’ children. Their families had owned 
adjoining farms for generations. There were old 
family quarrels, so old that the young people did 
not know what it was all about. Both fathers ob¬ 
jected to their marriage. Last night they had met 
after chores, had walked about for hours in the 


7 o 


WINGED SEEDS 


starlight, trying to think of ways and means. They 
had loved since they could remember. It sounded 
to me as if a hundred years had passed over their 
baby heads. Suddenly, out of the star-lit shadows, 
two horses loomed up. They might borrow the 
horses, ride to Burlington, and be married before 
sunup! “We know ye caint fergive whut we done, 
but,—” and they looked at each other, at me. Well, 
all the world loves a lover. They were so ridicu¬ 
lously young and in earnest. Scotty, strangely 
enough, was quiet, did not growl low in his throat. 
Therefore he approved of them. “Yer hosses 
didn’t take no hurt, missus. We’ll do annything ye 
say.” I thought of what they would have to face 
later, when their two families heard of the 
marriage. 

I tried hard to look severe, as I most decidedly 
should have done. “Be good to each other.”— 
They managed to take themselves away, a thing so 
difficult for the untutored to accomplish. I was 
happy indeed, knowing that the mares were safe, 
to meet up with a marriage that smacked of medie¬ 
val romance. 

The following day was Saturday. By night, I 
got word that the blasting was at an end. Sunday 
morning, early, I expected the Doctor to return. 
Scotty and I met him at the station with our sheaf 
of miscellaneous news, ranging all the way from 
blasted granite to medieval romance. It was such 
fun telling him things. He had a gift of making 


GRANITE WALLS AND ROMANCE 71 

narration easy. The story gained an air of added 
interest even to me, in the telling. “I like the way 
you have of letting horse thieves off with a friendly 
talk,” with pretended severity. I expected nothing 
less. “How can you say horse thieves! If you had 
seen that girl wife’s flower-like face,” I began. “I 
should most certainly have kissed her, so there!” 

We drove out to the lake with LeBoeuf next 
morning before seven o’clock; drove into a morning 
of pearly mist with gossamer veils of coming au¬ 
tumn in the tonic air. The night had woven lacy 
cobwebs and had dropped them on the glistening 
grasses. Blue asters and bright goldenrod lined the 
roadsides. Sumac berries gave a touch of autumn 
color. In the orchards early apples gleamed palely 
red. Sheaves of oats, barley, and wheat were care¬ 
fully set up to dry in the meadows against threshing 
time. Pumpkins were turning golden in the ripen¬ 
ing field corn that had tasseled out bravely. The 
silk on its big ears was red-brown. The corn was 
in the milk, ready to be harvested. Here and there, 
pale yellow leaves fluttered softly to earth, like the 
pale yellow butterflies that hovered low in the 
roads. All this color, this matured life was har¬ 
binger of autumn, of fulfillment. 

As we drove across the Slang Bridge, a great blue 
heron alighted on a pine stump, a beautiful thing in 
flight, though so ungainly as he stands poised on 
his lanky legs. The Slang Bridge is one of the old 
stone causeways. Bad as roads go, it is overflowed 


72 


WINGED SEEDS 


after each spring freshet; but it is beautiful at all 
times. Is there any time when a marsh is not a joy 
for the seeing eye? On this early autumn day it 
was filled with soft reds and yellows and browns on 
a distemper of gray and bright green. It was full 
of swaying reeds and undulating lily pods, full of 
aromatic smells of sedge and flag and arrowroot. 
“See the wild duck,” whispered the Doctor excit¬ 
edly, “six, eight, more than a dozen of them, black 
duck, feeding in the wild oats and rice.” “Gosh, 
wish’d I hed my gun,” said LeBoeuf. “TV dum 
things er right in line.” I rejoiced that there was 
no gun handy. Wild flowers and wild game are so 
beautiful in their home haunts. They seem so 
happy. They make part of so wonderful, so peace¬ 
ful a picture like the bittersweet berries climbing the 
rail of the old bridge. The golden berries hung 
bright among their soft, green leaves. Soon hoar 
frost would break them open to show their fiery-red 
hearts. 

We drove on to the farm in the most leisurely 
way. When we came to the Big Oak clearing, we 
let the builder go on to the lake. We stopped to 
look at our mares. They seemed no worse for their 
romantic night ride. Scotty and they greeted each 
other like old friends. Over at the foundation work 
was going on. They made haste, it seemed, slowly. 
The Doctor helped LeBoeuf get his plumb lines and 
other paraphernalia ready, and together they 
measured out the foundation and the cellar walls. 


GRANITE WALLS AND ROMANCE 73 

It was exciting to think that the house was actually 
begun. It was so utterly different from the setting 
of the cedar posts for the porch of the Long House 
years ago, and yet, in essence, it was the same. 

Meanwhile debris was cleared away, cement and 
sand were being mixed, great stones were hauled 
close, and more preparatory work done. There 
were, approximately, thirty or forty men at work 
and a number of teams. A rough shack was in 
course of building, on rocks to the southwest of the 
foundation, where the ice house and cold storage 
place was later to be. It was intended for a work¬ 
men’s boarding and lodging house. This arrange¬ 
ment would facilitate and hasten the work of con¬ 
struction. We planned and hoped it might go on 
right through the winter. If everything went along 
without serious hitch, the builder expected to get 
foundation and side walls up and the roof on, be¬ 
fore frost. Hard or black frost is always to be ex¬ 
pected in early November, if not before. Of course, 
hard frost stops all mason and cement work. 

It was curious to watch the leisurely methods of 
these rural workers, men of American or of French- 
Canadian birth. Then to think of city gangs of 
foreigners working at top speed under driving, 
swearing Irish or American foremen. Despite all 
the apparent leisurely manner, stopping to light 
pipes, stopping to talk and to wonder—“abaout 
fishin’, duck huntin’,” or an escaped State School 
boy, and similar things of local interest, the work 


74 


WINGED SEEDS 


went steadily on. Stone was laid upon stone. The 
north wall grew apace. Much was accomplished 
each day. There was about it all a very human 
quality. There was none of the automatic, soul¬ 
less, machine-like, don’t-care-if-you-die quality about 
the job that is so characteristic of big city construc¬ 
tion gangs. Gangs they are rightly named. Here 
each man was a unit. Each man was not merely a 
teamster, or a mason, or a carpenter, or helper,— 
each man could do all or any one of these things and 
was willing to go from one to the other as necessity 
or circumstance required. 

There were mistakes made, there was shirking, 
there was stupidity, but it was not soulless. On the 
contrary, there was a spirit of pulling together, an 
esprit de corps, that was splendid. How much was 
in these men, how much was due to the Doctor’s 
encouragement and jollying and generalship, it was 
hard to say. Whatever it was, it helped along the 
construction of our home tremendously. It was 
good to feel that even in this earliest beginning there 
was unity and comradeship. There was a spirit of 
calm, of satisfaction, of gaiety, that fitted in well 
with the content and the happiness of harvest time. 

The sun shone brilliantly from a radiant sky. 
The men whistled and sang at their work. Fat, 
red-brown woodchucks came out of their burrows, 
watched for a moment wonderingly all this strange 
activity and noise in their formerly quiet haunts, 
wondered if it boded ill to them. Squirrels chat- 


GRANITE WALLS AND ROMANCE 75 

tered In the cedars, about their winter stores, per¬ 
haps. Red-winged blackbirds and white-tailed 
swallows were gathering in families and in flocks, 
undisturbed by all the turmoil. It was about time 
to plan their autumn flight. Cooling winds whis¬ 
pered in the tall pines. They bent their plumed 
heads in unison. The water played in tune with 
the trees and the winds, and the far hills and the 
valleys sang. 


CHAPTER EIGHT 


A UNIQUE CHRISTMAS AND EMBRYO FARMING 

W E received weekly reports from our builder. 

Things were going “like a house afire.” 
Things had taken an “awful slump.” He was “fair 
discouraged.” The old man had much of the tem¬ 
peramental color of his French ancestors. “Would 
not the Doctor or the Missus please come up?” He 
must see one or the other or both. We found, in 
the end, that we had to go up at least once or twice 
a month, to keep up the old man’s spirits and his 
enthusiasm. They were hard trips, especially for 
the Doctor. He went up at midnight of Saturday, 
had but a few hours of daylight at the farm, and 
returned the same night, so as to keep his many 
appointments on Monday. When I went up to lend 
the glamour of my presence, as it were, I remained 
two days, at least. The Doctor would have it no 
other way. I stayed with Mrs. Gaines at the Ver- 
gennes hotel over night. 

Christmas we went up together, prepared to 
camp at the Stone House. The “house” was at its 
present stage a huge, barn-like structure, with great, 
gray walls, yawning caverns of Stygian darkness, 

76 , 


A UNIQUE CHRISTMAS 


77 


and a roof so high above us that we were reminded 
of Winchester Cathedral. But there we were, at 
home, prepared for anything. 

The builder left for his drive back to Vergennes 
at dusk, which fell shortly after four on that late 
December day. We felt as if we were alone in a 
strange world of trees, shadows, and stone. The 
workmen’s boarding place on the rocks was dark 
and untenanted. The workers had all gone to their 
homes to be with their families for the holiday. 
One end of what was in reality the cellar was fairly 
cleaned up. Our tent had been set up and the floor 
covered with plank and cedar and spruce. It 
smelled nice and Christmassy. I laid our old camp 
canvas table cloth on the folding table, drew up our 
camp chairs, and made up our cot beds. When two 
safety lanterns were lighted, and a blue flame oil 
heater was burning brightly, our tent looked festive 
and cosy. 

“Now for a Christmas tree,” said the Doctor. 
We must cut it before nightfall.” We quickly 
found and cut a little, straight, spreading hemlock. 
It was not cold. There was no snow. Beyond the 
pines hung a gorgeous, red sunset curtain. The 
east was softly luminous with a full moon rising 
over the great oaks and white birches. Christmas 
night, the night dedicated by all the centuries and 
countless peoples to peace and good will! Here in 
God’s silent, wide dim woods, there was deep, 
wondrous deep peace. The world seemed bathed, 


WINGED SEEDS 


78 

flooded with peace; like the quiet of the silver rain 
the moon was pouring down on all things. 

When we got back our brightly-lighted tent 
glowed with welcome cheer. Inside our walls of 
canvas it was warm as toast. The warmth brought 
out strongly the aromatic smell of evergreen boughs 
on floor and on tent walls. While I made our little 
hemlock gay with red candles and scarlet ribbon, 
the Doctor made a rude fireplace, just outside our 
tent. He made a circle of the stone, which lay at 
hand everywhere on the cement floor. Then he 
built a fire, which lit up our cathedral vault fitfully. 
It seemed like trying the life of centuries past. We 
had with us our camp and cooking outfit. We 
grilled the chops brought all the way from New 
York—how far away it was—on forked sticks over 
the fire; we baked sweet potatoes in the ashes, we 
made coffee inside the tent. When red apples from 
our own trees were on the camp table, with its 
gaily-lighted tree, and the steaming hot picnic meal 
was ready, life seemed a thing worth any struggle, 
a great adventure filled with interest and happiness. 
Our Christmas dinner in a tent set up in a cellar 
tasted like a feast of Lucullus. Nightingales’ 
tongues and wine, cooled in the snows from distant 
mountains, could not have been half so good. 

We decided that it was the most delightful 
Christmas we had ever experienced. Surely it was 
unique, weird almost, when our fire flared and lit 
up the great stones in the walls that were more than 


A UNIQUE CHRISTMAS 


79 


a foot thick, the roof seemingly miles above us, and 
the broken stone lying about. On that night the 
spirit of our new home was born, our first night 
within the intimacy and the safety of its four walls. 

Snow fell toward morning despite the moonlit 
night. We awoke to the beauty of a mild, sunny, 
glittery Christmas day, and spent it in the woods and 
on the lake. Another night in our tent, and then we 
went back to New York, to reality, and to work. 
We both voted it the most exhilarating and amusing 
outing we had ever had, and promised ourselves we 
would repeat it or something akin to it. Yet, as 
happens so often in busy, full lives, we never again 
experienced anything even faintly resembling this 
truly merry Christmas. 

After the holidays, our building went steadily on. 
Each week saw much accomplished. By March, 
they had finished plastering the inner walls. The 
heating plant had been installed at the earliest pos¬ 
sible moment for the sake of warmth for the work¬ 
ers, and to dry out the plaster. By April, door cas¬ 
ings and windows were in. We confidently ex¬ 
pected to be able to live in the Stone House by the 
first of June, although it would be far from finished, 
we knew. We both went up a number of times to 
hearten the builder and to advise him regarding 
doubtful points. He had never come in contact 
with so complicated a plumbing and water system 
in his life before. “What in heaven’s name did ye 
want with two bathrooms in one house? Ye’ve all 


8o 


WINGED SEEDS 


th’ lake outdoors to bathe in, in summertime.” He 
did not mention the winters. 

Meanwhile getting from Vergennes or Ferris- 
burgh station to the lake in deep snows and through 
deeper drifts was not always the simplest thing. 
Both the Doctor and I had several adventures, re¬ 
sulting on two occasions in not getting there at all. 
One morning I started out from the hotel at Ver¬ 
gennes, although Mrs. Gaines tried her best to dis¬ 
suade me, saying we’d not make it anyway. I had 
come up all the way from New York to go to the 
farm, and if it was humanly possible, I intended so 
to do. The driver and I started, got about two miles 
out, had to shovel ourselves and the horses out of 
the drifts several times. Much to my disgust, we 
had to turn back. Right there, I learned my lesson 
about country roads during and after a great storm 
of wind and snow. When I returned home I found 
it hard to explain, was ashamed to explain, that I 
had actually not seen the farm or the builder. Yet 
I had never been so cold or so exhausted in my life. 

The Doctor’s experience, in a way, was worse and 
more dangerous. He, too, set out, as I had done, in 
a blizzard to take his late train back to New York. 
It was after nightfall. They started against the 
advice of everyone, and got less than half a mile 
away from the lake. Then they must have driven 
’round and ’round in a circle, all the time in Chester 
Hawkin’s pasture, instead of in the road, unable to 
sense direction owing to the wind and the storm. 


A UNIQUE CHRISTMAS 


81 


Long after midnight they managed to get back to 
our farmhouse, and that was owing to the sagacity 
of the team. By that time both horses and men 
were more than half frozen. 

By the first of April the farmhouse was ready for 
the family we had engaged to work for us. The 
clap-boarded cottage was well built, had a slate roof 
and red brick chimneys. Eventually we intended 
painting it colonial yellow, with pale green shutters. 
All the buildings were to be a pale colonial yellow. 
The house had a bathroom and running hot and cold 
water in the kitchen, piped from a windmill set high 
above the lake. This water system was a tempo¬ 
rary thing. Another year, the Doctor expected to 
dig an artesian well so as to supply both farmhouse 
and barns with running water. 

With the end of April came the time for setting 
out our young orchards. I went up and stayed at 
the farmhouse for two weeks. The children soon 
grew to like me, and through them I won the older 
members of our farm family. To save them em¬ 
barrassment as well as for my own sake, I had my 
meals alone. They were surprisingly satisfactory. 
But then, I was prepared to find everything good. 
I was so elated with the beauty of the early spring, 
and with the beauty of the Stone House, despite its 
low ceilings and its small windows. Of course, Mr. 
Platt and the Doctor were right. 

Every waking hour was fraught with joyous in¬ 
terest. It was cold and damp, the mud of the roads 


82 


WINGED SEEDS 


was unspeakable; walking was difficult. But the sky 
was radiant, the sun blindingly bright, the wind and 
the air redolent of awakening spring. Robins, 
bluebirds, phoebes, warblers, even orioles; all the 
summer birds were returning. Each morning 
brought new voices. Sap was rising in the trees, 
leaf buds were swelling, were bursting, and the 
yellow brown meadows were shimmering green. 
Over the cedar woods, far away, there were clouds 
of floating green and gray, poplars and birches 
awaking from their winter sleep. It was all so 
beautiful, that my throat ached and my eyes filled, 
and I wished the man of dreams might have left his 
work and his patients and lived through it all 
with me. 

I bought two dozen pure-bred barred Plymouth 
Rock hens and a splendid, big rooster, and also some 
settings of eggs to start the hennery. As soon as the 
hens began to feel at home in their new quarters, 
they showed signs of wanting to set. They re¬ 
mained on their nests constantly to keep their fluffy 
bodies warm, took on an air of calm and mother¬ 
liness, except when one tried to remove them from 
their chosen place. They could be fairly nasty when 
they tried, squawking and trying to bite. Lina, our 
farmer’s wife, and I set the mother hens on clean 
nests of straw, in a place by themselves, where the 
laying hens would not disturb them nor their eggs. 
For Lina, this was a commonplace thing, part of 
the day’s work in spring. For me, it was both inter- 


A UNIQUE CHRISTMAS 83 

esting and exciting to work at last with a vital 
thing, with something that was alive, instead of, for 
instance, cataloguing medical monographs, or look¬ 
ing up bibliographies and statistics of defective 
children. It was wonderful to know that those 
hard-shelled eggs would develop into baby chicks 
after twenty-one short days; to watch the brooding 
mother hen leave her eggs barely long enough to eat 
and to drink; to see her turning her eggs daily. 
There were bad mothers too; they let their eggs get 
chilled. Like human mothers, they wanted to gad 
about. 

No trees had as yet been planted. The old 
French-Canadian whom I had hired for the tree¬ 
planting, said the ground was still too wet. A great 
part of our farm was clay land, which dries slowly. 
We bought our trees from Newell, of Westport 
across the lake. He was an interesting old man, a 
typical old-time farmer. He represented a Roches¬ 
ter nursery house, and he knew pretty much all that 
concerned apple and other Northern fruit growing. 
He could give you practical information regarding 
soil fertility, and farm and garden lore. Although 
not lacking in intelligence, he clung to old, leisurely 
methods of husbandry. Yet he sent his son to 
an agricultural school. His allegiance to his firm, 
and his honesty, both were proverbial in our val¬ 
ley. He was a familiar figure on our roads, with 
his paralyzed right arm, his snow-white hair and 
beard, his kindly, blue eyes. He liked best to walk 


WINGED SEEDS 


84 

from farm to farm, carrying his shabby bag that 
bulged with highly-colored catalogues, in which all 
apples, all pears, all berries, all roses grow to won¬ 
drous size and perfection. He came to us in au¬ 
tumn and again in spring. We miss him. 

Our apple trees were shipped to us in early spring, 
in March, while in a wholly dormant state. They 
were heeled in, that is, buried in a slanting position 
in soft, moist earth, with the tops uncovered. They 
remained in their sheltered place and position until 
the frost should leave the ground and holes could 
be dug to set out the trees. 

On Sunday morning, I had a surprise. The 
Doctor arrived at the farm. He was disappointed 
about the trees, but the progress they had made on 
our house was gratifying. The cornice was in place, 
the cap stones over doors and windows were “just 
right.” He had selected them on the lake shore and 
in the woods, stones that were sun-cracked and 
beautifully-colored. It was a house at last, a sim¬ 
ple, dignified, well-proportioned one. It satisfied 
even the man of dreams. “Now, don’t you like the 
ceilings and the windows?” he asked. “Who cares 
about ceilings and windows, when the wind and the 
air and everything is filled with music!” I replied. 

The Doctor stayed long enough to make some 
real farm purchases. Two sleek mild-eyed Jersey 
heifers came first. Then two shoats, baby pigs. 
And most important of all, he bought a heavy draft 
team. There were already several cats and David, 


A UNIQUE CHRISTMAS 85 

a shaggy dog, part shepherd, part collie. Like most 
collies, David was the lovingest thing. His intelli¬ 
gence was quite human, especially in regard to cows. 
He had never been trained in any way. Instinc¬ 
tively he knew. He brought the heifers to and from 
the pasture morning and night. Never once did he 
bite or molest them unnecessarily. He kept them in 
the middle of the road by making peculiar little 
sounds of protest and giving a soft, scampering nip 
at their hind legs. This modest and small beginning 
seemed like a lot of stock to me. “You wait and 
see what we’ll have in a few years from now,” said 
the Doctor. It was utterly impossible for him to 
think only of the thing in hand. The present and 
its problems were there to be coped with in the best 
way imaginable. But the all-important, the fasci¬ 
nating thing was the vision. 

My Canadian helper decided that the time had 
come to set the young apple trees. He was a quaint, 
gentle peasant. I have seen his like in Normandy. 
He called himself Peter Field, although his name 
was Pierre Deschamps. He said they “made fahn” 
of his French name in Vergennes. Together we 
staked out the land for the new orchard. John and 
Peter dug the holes. The trees were set thirty feet 
apart each way. By noon thirty holes were ready 
for the little trees. One must not open up too many 
holes at a time, the old man explained to me, lest 
the earth dry. Into each hole he put a handful of 
high-grade fertilizer, carefully mixed with earth, 


86 


WINGED SEEDS 


so as not to burn the tiny roots and rootlets. I cut 
apart the bundles of sleeping, yet living trees. We 
planted alternately a row of Rhode Island Green¬ 
ings and a row of McIntosh Reds. A row of one 
variety, then a row of the other, for the sake of 
inter-pollination. Old Peter showed me how to 
prune off roots that were bruised, taking care not to 
injure the tap root; also how to prune tapering 
branches, to permit no more breathing above the 
ground than below. Then I proudly and painstak¬ 
ingly set the baby tree in its prepared hole. Old 
Peter spread out the rootlets, so that each one 
would have room to live and to breathe. He pul¬ 
verized the earth around them, taking out stones 
and hard lumps. When the roots were deeply buried 
in friable dirt, John took his spade and filled in all 
the earth that had been dug out of the hole and 
more. Then as I held the tree in its upright po¬ 
sition, the old man stamped down the earth around 
it. Winds could not disturb the little tree. 

When he had finished he took off his worn cap 
and crossed himself devoutly. His lips moved. 
“Maybe, ma’am, y’ tink me fool ol’ man,” in his 
bastard Canuck English. “I tink me, I say leetl’ 
pray to our good God for leetl’ tree. He grow bet¬ 
ter, sur’.” I turned away to hide the tears. What 
a wondrous thing is faith, the simplicity, the dignity, 
the consolation of it! As each sapling stood 
straight and upright in its new home, he repeated 
his little ceremony. Somehow, it seemed in keeping 


A UNIQUE CHRISTMAS 


87 

with the hope, the tenderness of spring, with the 
greening meadows, the singing and the nest-building 
of birds. 

Day after day we planted, until three hundred 
little trees stood bravely in straight, even rows, both 
sides of what was later to be the drive. The old 
orchard trees showed great improvement. Like 
most growing things, they were trying to show 
their gratitude for the work done for them in the 
autumn. They were turning from dull brown to 
living, glowing red. Their hearts were beginning 
to beat and their life blood to circulate. They 
seemed to look protectingly, lovingly at the baby 
trees we had planted in their midst and all about 
them. 

There were days of rain when John and Peter 
cleaned and picked up around the barn and sheds 
and henhouse. All these buildings were only fin¬ 
ished in part. Every effort was put on the work at 
the Stone House. Each day of rain brought in its 
wake more and richer color. It was the first of 
May. The woods were still soggy. Water lay in 
little pools in every hollow. On shrubs and bushes 
brown buds were tipping their points with pale 
green. Fern fronds were tightly-curled green cork¬ 
screws. Trillium lily leaves were swelling buds of 
color, as were the jacks-in-the-pulpit. Wild ginger 
showed its awakening pale leaves. One morning, 
when the sunshine was so bright that it fairly hurt, 
I found my first hepatica under its dead brown, and 


88 


WINGED SEEDS 


woolly, new green leaves. I felt like old Peter. 
I think a prayer was in my heart, and I know I sang 
for sheer joy. 

How I wished I might have stayed at the farm, 
until the baby chicks should creep out of their shells. 
There was much to call me back home to New York. 
The Doctor had begun to buy things for the Stone 
House. He loved to “buy things,” decorative 
things for our home. Never, at his soberest times, 
did he know the exact amounts he was spending. 
Nor did he much care. A thing pleased him; it 
was useful, beautiful, artistic. How could he be 
expected to think of the unimportant detail of cost? 
Yes, it was time to go back and “to throw cold 
water” on his joyous and unconcerned buying. 


CHAPTER NINE 


AT THE FARM AT LAST 

W E went out to the ocean end of Long Island 
to see a driving pair. They proved to be 
two beautiful young bay fillies, coming four and 
five, just what the Doctor wanted. They were 
Kentucky thoroughbreds, broken to both saddle 
and harness. We bought them to the accompani¬ 
ment of bitter weeping on the part of the owner’s 
wife and daughter. The owner said that he could 
not afford to keep a motor and horses, especially 
when the horses could be used only for the lighest 
work. They really were not fitted for anything but 
driving. 

One day in late May I was called to the tele¬ 
phone. With abject apology the Long Island man 
explained. The time had come to ship the fillies. 
His wife and little daughter were so desperately 
unhappy, that he would have to break his word. 
They were willing to give up the car if only they 
might keep the fillies. What could he do? Would 
I explain to the Doctor? He was both ashamed 
and afraid to do so. He was returning our cheque. 
I was disappointed, and did not hesitate to say so. 

The Doctor, to whom the man dreaded to explain, 

89 


9 o 


WINGED SEEDS 


understood the matter much better than I did, and 
wrote him a little note. By messenger, the follow¬ 
ing day, came a great box with every type of knife 
for farm use, from pruning shears for trees to 
butchering knives for hogs. But we had no driving 
team. 

We were busy selecting furniture and furnishings 
to take up to the farm, everything that could pos¬ 
sibly be spared from our New York home. The 
Doctor chose favorite books, pet prints, rugs he 
liked, in fact, anything and everything. “After all,” 
he said, “New York is our working home. It’s got 
to be for some years to come. But the Stone House 
is our real, our spiritual home. Let’s take all our 
pet possessions, the things we love best, up there.” 
In the end, we compromised. I refused to disman¬ 
tle completely our house in town. 

We enjoyed buying hardware for doors and win¬ 
dows, looking up fire screens and motor boats, and 
a big pipe organ, all the things we hoped some day 
to possess. We bought our first working garden 
and farm tools. We bought driving harness and 
horse blankets, and the thousand and one things 
necessary to begin our life on the farm in sober 
earnest. It was strange, how we felt right from the 
start, that we were doing the permanent thing at 
last. At our farm we would eventually live our life 
and end it. It was lucky for the Doctor’s work that 
his was not a one-track mind, like mine. His pa¬ 
tients surely would have suffered. For him, the 


AT THE FARM AT LAST 


9 1 


work he was doing at the moment, was the only 
thing in existence. When he closed his office door, 
there existed nothing and no one in all the world, 
but the soul who had appealed to his aid. It often 
seemed to me as if it were souls that he cured, 
rather than bodies. He gave himself utterly, there 
was no reserve. The wear and tear of his life was 
appalling. And there was the wonder, the philoso¬ 
pher’s stone of the farm. It was the absolute 
change from things abnormal and pathologic to 
things normal and sane. 

My mind was so filled with the thought and the 
joy of the farm that I fairly hated my spring house¬ 
keeping duties; the cleaning of cupboards and gen¬ 
eral going-over of our house. I remembered the 
days long gone, when my father celebrated our 
birthdays. He prepared our surprise in a room 
that we were in honor bound not to enter, nor even 
to peek through the keyhole. May was endlessly 
long that year, like the time before those vanished 
childhood birthdays. However, it finally came to 
an end. It seemed best for me to go up with our 
cook ahead of the remainder of the family. In this 
way, we might have at least a semblance of home 
and order before the Doctor arrived. He had lived 
through a particularly trying winter and spring, and 
was fairly near the breaking point nervously. 

Our faithful Nora had married her Patrick. Her 
place as cook was now filled by one of her numerous 
cousins, Mary by name. Mary and I took the night 


92 


WINGED SEEDS 


train and were duly met at Ferrisburgh station by 
John. Ferrisburgh was now our postoffice, being 
four miles nearer to our farm than Vergennes. 
Vergennes was still the base of supplies, Ferrisburgh 
consisting of the postoffice and general store, the 
blacksmith shop, the creamery, and a few cottages, 
and the Town Hall. 

John said, in the sensational way so dear to his 
kind: “Ye’ll not know whar t’ set yer feet, an’ 
haow ye be goin’ t’ do anny work, I’d like t’ know. 
Th’ haouse, th’ mansion,”—he corrected himself, 
“is full o’ evry kin’ o’ mess, wi’ carpenters an’ 
painters. Ye caint git aout ner in ’thaout walkin’ 
up plank an’ stone. Guess ye’ll hev t’ walk top o’ 
barrels an’ boxes in yer kitchen. Lina, she says, she 
an’t never seed th’ like on’t. An’ they’re cementin’ 
o’ th’ yard.” He turned to me. “I got yer things 
ye wrote me t’, fr’m Basin Harbour.” Mary looked 
worried. She could not understand this hired man’s 
talking before he was asked to speak. She did not 
know the equality idea of the rural Vermont 
worker. He intended no disrespect. He was trying 
to be hospitable and pleasant. His monotonous, 
fortunately low voice trailed on. 

I barely heard him, for we were driving into a 
gloriously fresh, golden morning of such fragrance 
and clearness as one remembers only in dreams. 
The roadsides were lined with wild things in joyous 
bloom, cherry, plum, hawthorn. Apple trees in 
meadows were drifted with thousands of white 


AT THE FARM AT LAST 


93 

butterflies, or what looked like winged things. But 
these winged things were poignantly fragrant. I 
had never seen anything so delicately, so touchingly 
lovely. The freshness of the young leaves, the color 
of the lake in the distance, the smell of the blossoms, 
the singing of countless birds filled the world. 

We arrived. There had been disorder and upset, 
years ago, when we came to the newly-finished Long 
House. Compared to what we now saw, it had 
been heavenly order and quiet. There was our 
beautiful house surrounded on every side by deep, 
jagged holes filled with broken stone, mortar, lum¬ 
ber, with debris of every imaginable description 
piled up every which way.—Right there I stopped. 
Was this not the very reason for coming to-day? 
Was it not exactly what we had expected and 
known?—We had three days clear to work. There 
to the north, beyond the trees, was the lake, spark¬ 
ling and dancing in the sun. There were the trees 
in their exquisite dress of spring. Where was my 
sense of proportion? 

As John had said, we walked up an inclined, 
slippery plank, with a deep hole of broken stone 
eight feet or so below, to fall into. Our kitchen 
was filled with boxes and crates and barrels piled 
high, a perfect pandemonium of mess, so to speak, 
but it was flooded with sunlight. A splendid fire 
cheered up the brand-new, much benickeled range. 
Breakfast was ready, the builder told us. This was 
Lina’s contribution for our comfort. I sat on a box 


94 


WINGED SEEDS 


and had a good cup of coffee, with our own cream 
and our own really-truly, fresh eggs, and I’d hate 
to say how many of Lina’s good soda biscuit, with 
cream, not creamery butter. All these goodies were 
placed democratically on the top of a Park and Til- 
ford barrel, covered with clean white paper. 
Strange, how one’s outlook upon life and a 
troublous world can be changed by a satisfactory 
breakfast! As quickly as I could, I donned my 
Long House camp clothes, and went through the 
house on an inspection tour. I had my oceans of 
light and sun. Even the laundry and cellars were 
flooded with light. There were all the cupboards, 
and my linen room, and every last thing anyone 
could wish for, and infinitely more. And every¬ 
where was the beautiful outlook into the trees, over 
the lake, and beyond to the hills. 

Fully twenty men were at work in or about the 
house. All offered to help. I set one to open bar¬ 
rels and another to clean up brick, mortar, lumber, 
and nails out of the rooms we wanted to set in order 
first. No cleaning had been done since the building 
of fireplaces, the adjusting of moldings, or the set¬ 
ting in of windows and doors. When we left the 
Long House we had carefully marked boxes and 
barrels and had entered their contents in a little 

i 

book. The transportation from Basin Harbour 
over muddy roads, and in rain and sun had oblit¬ 
erated every trace of lettering. When we wanted 
pillows and blankets, we found kitchen ware. When 


AT THE FARM AT LAST 


95 


towels were the one thing needed, we found flags. 
By this time, we were game for anything. What 
did it all matter? We were at the farm, in the 
Stone House, beginning to make it into a home. It 
was June in a world of light and color. The man 
of dreams would soon come. “God’s in his heaven, 
All’s right with the world.” 

By night the study was clean and sweet. Shades 
were hung. The green-stained table from the Long 
House living room and the spindle chairs were in 
place. With a study lamp in the center, writing and 
smoking materials at hand, all the books I could find 
put about, with a rug on the floor and the red sun¬ 
set light filtering in, it was good to look at. Next 
came our bedroom. There I had another one of the 
surprises so loved by the Doctor. John asked to see 
me, and said the Doctor had written him about 
some crates marked Hampton Shops, which con¬ 
tained furniture for the north bedroom. Did I 
wish him to unpack the crates? Mary had told 
him we were cleaning the north rooms. I had the 
crates opened, wondering what on earth they con¬ 
tained. Out of much paper and many pads of ex¬ 
celsior emerged an adorable bedroom set of 
mahogany. 

The next morning, after a six o’clock breakfast, 
I made up my mind to go exploring to the farm 
and into the woods before beginning to work. I 
took Mary with me. “Soon’s I can, when we get 
our house to rights, I’d like to milk a cow, ma’am- 


96 WINGED SEEDS 

’Twill be like home to me thin,” said the Irish 
woman wistfully. She had left her people and the 
little farm in Donegal many years before, to try the 
country where money could be picked up in the 
streets. Like so many emigrants, whose friends 
have gone ahead and persuaded those at home to 
follow, she had found that, even in wonderful 
America, one must work to live. 

At the henhouse, we found fluffy baby chicks with 
the mother hen. Directly she saw us, she ruffled up 
her feathers, and called her babies to her for pro¬ 
tection. She did not know, as yet, that we were 
friends. We went to the barn, where a baby heifer 
calf had arrived five days before. It was to be 
raised, therefore was not permitted to be with its 
mother. The modern human baby brought up ac¬ 
cording to schedule, has its regular hours of sleep 
and food. A baby calf, which is to be raised for 

i 

milk, is not allowed to suckle its mother cow, but is 
• 

taught to drink from a pail. The pail is kept scru¬ 
pulously clean. The calf is fed at regular intervals, 
only twice per day. The reason for this is that 
fresh milk is used directly after milking time, night 
and morning. The baby calf looked at us with 
bright eyes, its little mouth and rough tongue all 
white and milky from its feeding shortly before. 

We walked back toward the house. Lush green 
meadow alternated with dim green woods. The 
sweet earthy smell of spring hung over everything. 
Underfoot were starry white blossoms of wild 


AT THE FARM AT LAST 


97 

strawberry, purple bells of violet, and the red and 
gold trumpets of columbine, which I had never seen 
grow wild. Still deeper in the evergreen woods, we 
found pale anemone, lovely arethusa, the tiny or¬ 
chid, and yellow adders’ tongue with its striped 
leaves. Mary wanted to gather the charming wild¬ 
ings for me, but I asked her to let them live. They 
looked so happy in their woodsy home. 

For the first time I saw that oaks leaf out later 
than other.deciduous trees. The Big Oak was just 
beginning to unfold its buds in lonely splendor. It 
was hung with veils upon veils of feathery, inde¬ 
scribably beautiful blue-green. I sat down to rest 
and “to have my moment of joy”, to let it sink in 
deep. Was there ever anything so gloriously, so 
magically beautiful, as spring? There was so much 
to see, that I had not noticed the young apple trees. 
I had actually not seen them at all. Good heavens! 
I had completely forgotten my work and the house. 
Mary had gone back to her work. Never have I 
done anything harder than to return to setting in 
order a tumbled house on that rare, early June 
morning, when every nerve thrilled with desire to 
explore the woods and the fields. 

Our bedroom faced north like the study, but with 
a sunrise outlook, where the study faced the wester¬ 
ing sun. I slept that night in a beautifully comfort¬ 
able mahogany bed, looked at my tired and dishev¬ 
eled self in a tall mahogany cheval glass, and 
thought of the Doctor’s exquisite taste and of his 


WINGED SEEDS 


98 

incorrigible extravagance. A song sparrow in the 
elm, that stretches protecting arms over my east 
window, awoke me. The sun was rising, pearly, 
golden and rose, gossamer and green. What had I 
ever done to deserve all this beauty, this joy? But 
it was not a question of poetic dreams anent sun¬ 
rise or other miracles of a spring morning. The 
question was immediate and practical. There was 
one more day left to clear the kitchen and to get 
the dining room ready for dinner and for the 
Doctor. The colorful sunrise brought rain before 
noon. The robins knew; they were telling each 
other all morning that despite the sunshine rain was 
on the way. Thank heaven, the rain made it easy 
to stick to the indoor work. The worst was the 
everlasting presence of workmen, hard as they tried 
to keep out of our way. And it smelled abominably 
of paint and varnish. 

By the end of the afternoon, we had really accom¬ 
plished wonders. In the kitchen and the pantry 
barrels and boxes were still piled high; but there 
were runways between, as we say of the paths made 
by foxes and other wild things. John had gone to 
the station to meet the Doctor. Luckily, it had 
stopped raining. One of the farm children brought 
over milk, cream, and eggs. “There’s th’ train, 
Missus. When th’ wind’s saouth, ye kin hear it 
blow fer V’gennes.” What an infinity of facts 
there were to be learned in the country, points of the 
compass, winds, weather, what not? These little 


AT THE FARM AT LAST 


99 


boys knew more about real things, vital facts, than 
I should be able to learn in years. At seven, dinner 
was ready, the dining room comfy, the table set, 
lamps were lighted, and I was dressed. 

They arrived, the Doctor, Scotty, Delia and Katy. 
Was I dreaming? It was not the heavy work team 
that had met me, but a beautiful pair of young bay 
fillies. Another surprise. The team had been 
shipped by express on the very train that brought 
the Doctor. John had known, for he drove up with 
a neighbor, trailing the surrey, and taking the light 
double driving harness with him. It had all been 
carefully planned. “Let me present to you, Lady 
and Sister, own sisters, coming three and four. 
Like them?” Like them? I loved them already, 
beautiful, young sleek things! Our friend of the 
broken word from Long Island had put the Doctor 
in the way of buying this pair, also Kentucky thor¬ 
oughbreds, all on account of his little understanding 
note. 

We had a very gay dinner. Meanwhile Scotty 
was snuffing and investigating things from cellar to 
attic. Oh, yes, of course there was an attic. It had 
the loveliest view of the whole house. From the 
dining room we watched the afterglow die out in 
the west. The Doctor inquired where we were to 
sleep. “If you go on with your extravagance, we’ll 
not be able to buy any more land, ever.” “Well, 
don’t you like the bedroom furniture? I may as 
well tell you right now, that there’s some for the 


100 


WINGED SEEDS 


dining room on the way. And I’ve bought a small 
pipe organ.” “Splendid, the organ is good news!” 
The Doctor had longed for an organ for many 
years. “All your things are dead things. I’ve got 
live ones to show you to-morrow, a beautiful heifer 
calf, darling baby chicks. The oats and barley are 
up in lovely straight rows.” He asked about the 
apple trees. I said I had not looked at them. 
“There was the sky and the birds and the trees and 
the flowers and ferns,” I began. “Think of the 
years and years we shall have to see it all. Just 
wait until I get this house where I want it. Eventu¬ 
ally there’ll be a north lawn with a spindle balus¬ 
trade.” “What, and spoil the woods!” “No 
imagination yet! We’ll make apple orchards and a 
park of this farm, and buy a stock farm, where 
we’ll breed horses and cattle and hogs. Here we’ll 
have a race track and a rosegarden for you 

and-” “Probably end up in the poorhouse, or, 

as the natives say, be on the town.” 

We went upstairs at last. The Doctor had not 
thought that his study would be habitable. I had 
had the lamps lighted. He was more touched than 
he was willing to show, when he saw the room look¬ 
ing like home. “How in heaven’s name did you 
and Mary get all this work done in three days?” 
“I requisitioned one or two of your men.” “Good 
for you. I’ll see that we have you fixed up in a 
few days, so as to make getting about easier, if I 
have to use a dozen men. Let’s try the fireplace.” 



AT THE FARM AT LAST ioi 

We did; and it smoked fearfully. To tell the 
truth, I was glad something had gone wrong, just 
to know that we were human. We had all the tang 
of wood-smoke, and more than we desired. It’s not 
as sweet indoors as under God’s open sky. “Let’s 
put out the lights and get the view from all the 
windows on this floor.” It was a starry night, lumi¬ 
nous, yet veiled; still, so still, that we heard the 
splash of oars, although no boat was in sight. 
Split Rock Light burned steadily, brightly, like the 
eye of friendship watching the night. Home lights 
twinkled on the Essex shore. Beyond, far beyond, 
painted into hazy distance, hung the Adirondack 
hills, everlasting, mysterious. All about were 
shadowy trees hedged in by winged silence and the 
poignant fragrance and promise of June. 


CHAPTER TEN 


APPRENTICESHIP, ARTESIAN WELLS AND MANY 

OTHER THINGS 

T HE Doctor got into his camp clothes, and 
cleaned his favorite pipe. It was the last 
touch of home. Somehow a man’s man looks his 
best in pioneer dress, gray flannel shirt and all the 
rest of it, smoking a pipe, not a cigar nor a cigar¬ 
ette. During the three days of my presence, the 
workmen had seemed fairly busy. Directly the 
Doctor arrived, things began to hum. Teams and 
men were put at clearing away stone, mortar, lum¬ 
ber on every side, using all this waste material to fill 
up the deep, holes surrounding house and grounds. 
The porches could not be used, owing to unfinished 
floors. The kitchen yard and porch, where the 
cement was dry and hard, was cleaned, giving us 
one entrance, at least, where one was not in constant 
fear of breaking one’s back and legs. 

I asked one of the carpenters, a little French 
Canadian, to do some work for me in the pantry. 
“Ma’am, dose hired girls an’ be in dar,” he said, 
questioningly. I looked at him for an explanation, 
as we were accustomed to great willingness on the 

part of our men. He took off his cap to speak to 

102 


APPRENTICESHIP 


103 


me, an unusual thing, by the way. Most of the 
workers performed this act of courtesy only indoors. 
“Ma’am, please, I do annyting you say, for you, but 
I no can work wit’ dose girls.” I wondered what 
on earth could have happened. He went on. “Ef 
dere is woman wit’ our good God, I no want his 
heaven, me.” Later, I heard what had made a 
Schopenhauer of the little Canadian. He had been 
married to a virago of a wife, twice his size in body 
and mind. He had left her years before, and had 
been afraid of all things feminine ever since. Our 
maids were much amused, and kept industriously 
out of the poor little man’s way. 

Every last bit of rubbish was hauled away to fill 
yawning holes that clamored for more and more. 
Every barrel, crate, and box was opened for us. 
We unpacked all things from table linen and books 
to rice and matches. By another week cupboards 
and shelves were clean, and things had found their 
abiding places. Windows shone, white shades and 
curtains were hung, pictures were on the pure white 
walls that as yet could not be papered or painted. 
It was easy to achieve decorative effect with a back¬ 
ground of perfectly-proportioned space, with beau¬ 
tiful chimney breasts, with every window framing a 
picture and all the brilliant color and light. It just 
seemed to come of itself. 

The dining room furniture had arrived. The 
Doctor had chosen the pieces with our old round 
mahogany table and its many wide leaves in mind. 


104 


WINGED SEEDS 


It had the same simple lines. It was perfect. The 
organ, too, had come. When we took it out of its 
crate, we found the pedals jammed, the keyboard 
out of kilter, and internal injuries. I almost wept. 
The Doctor immediately made an adventure out of 
this unfortunate happening. “Never mind; some 
stormy day I’ll take the thing apart and fix it up. 
I always longed to see the inside of an organ.” 
This consoling speech had an ominous sound. I 
had had experience with his taking things apart and 
putting them together again. The taking apart was 
done when the spirit moved him, and the putting to¬ 
gether in the same wise, with frequently a long in¬ 
terval between. At such times, we were accustomed 
to see signs something like this. “Do not clean or 
dust this room until I’m through.” Or, “Don’t 
move anything in this place.” 

Of all things in our house, I liked the woodwork 
most of all. It was so admirably simple and so 
creamy white. Chimney breasts, doors, windows, 
all were finished with the lovely drop trimming, that 
in England they call Georgian. We have adapted it 
and call it Colonial, and it is really Greek. Of 
course, the woodwork had received only a priming 
coat. This creamy color with the alabaster white 
of the walls and the ceilings, was very attractive. I 
said I liked it. “Wait until we have dull gold on 
the drawing room walls and tapestry paper in the 
dining room, and gray and pink in our room, and 
soft greens and browns everywhere else”— “Do 


APPRENTICESHIP 


105 


you suppose, you will ever get through with your 
house?” I asked. “Don’t wish it. We cannot build 
another house. I shall have to get into mischief, 
merely to keep sufficiently busy and to get a new 
sensation.” 

The Doctor insisted on our being outdoors a part 
of each day. He looked after the farm, the stock, 
meadows, trees, pastures. He found that John was 
not trustworthy, and had to be dismissed. I was 
sorry to lose Lina and the children. We soon found 
a new farm family, although we made a number of 
changes before the right people came to us. We 
hired two men to work by the month and to live at 
our farmhouse. At that time, board and lodging 
and twenty-five dollars per month was good wages. 
To-day a boy would earn more and be able to save 
less. The hired men were old Ben Bailey and a 
friend of his, Jim Graves. The latter was as good 
a worker as Ben. Like Ben, he was experienced in 
all farmwork and farm lore. He was a staunch be¬ 
liever in the great Republican party, in ghosts, and 
in hard cider, particularly the latter. 

The first thing the two men did was to make our 
garden. We were very late about this work and 
could only plant a small number of vegetables. We 
had decided that this year we must see the whole 
thing from the beginning. We had already chosen 
about half an acre north of the young orchard. The 
land, fortunately, had been ploughed both in fall 
and in spring, as every good garden should be. It 


106 WINGED SEEDS 

was protected from the north by evergreen woods, 
and lay along a little slope. We had it harrowed 
and harrowed and harrowed again, pulverizing the 
dirt as much as possible before putting in the seed. 
This makes the seed bed, as it is called. I did enjoy 
watching the harrow discs rubbing against each 
other like great iron hands, fining the clods and 
lumps of earth. After the wheel harrows had done 
the coarse part of the work, came a spike tooth 
harrow. This is a big, square tool of iron and 
steel, set with great spikes. It is drawn by two 
horses, with the man walking behind. The other 
harrows have seats for the worker. This last har¬ 
row smoothes the dirt and makes a soft, fine bed for 
the little seeds to rest and to get strength to sprout 
their tiny wings. Small furrows were measured out 
in long, straight rows, in order to be able to culti¬ 
vate easily and quickly. Into each furrow fertilizer 
was scattered thinly, evenly mixed with the dirt. 
The two men watered our late garden morning and 
night, before the sun was hot and after sunset. 

There came a two-days rain storm, still, gray, 
beautiful. Then came Sunday, blessed day of rest 
with no men about, no sound but the birds, the wind, 
and the water. The Doctor and I walked through 
the rain-washed woods, with sunlight iridescence on 
every glistening leaf. From the green dusk of the 
sun-dappled trees we came out into the shining, sun¬ 
drenched orchard, and lo, our garden was up in 
narrow rows of soft green. Our seeds had grown 


APPRENTICESHIP 


107 

their tiny wings, had pushed apart their graves of 
earth, had reached the light of day. We knelt down 
and looked close to see. What we saw was a row of 
little green things like crooked green fingers. All 
plants break through the crust of earth in this posi¬ 
tion, the Doctor explained to me. In this way, it is 
easier for them to push. As they reach the light, 
they slowly straighten to worship the sun, and 
spread their two wings. Many times since that 
Sunday morning in spring, I have sat in my green¬ 
house and watched the crooked fingers straighten up 
till their tiny heads point up to the sun. In their 
small way they rival the stained-glass windows of a 
Gothic church pointing up to heaven. 

Ben and Jim were setting out with their fishing 
gear. “If we hev’ anny luck, we’ll bring ye an’ the 
Missus a big pike, Doc’,” called old Ben, as they 
went by. 

We walked up to the end of our land on the 
south, where it adjoined the estate of Mr. Walter 
Scranton, with whose family we had recently become 
acquainted. Dear Mrs. Scranton! She has long 
since joined her fathers. Sweet of face and man¬ 
ner, she was a type of old-fashioned lady in whose 
presence one instinctively felt at ease. A type, un¬ 
fortunately, that we are outgrowing fast, in this age 
of suffrage and of equal standards, of Margot 
Asquith and Madeleine Marx. 

We climbed a fence, and found ourselves in a 
ledgy pasture, over-grown with brambles and bitter- 


io8 


WINGED SEEDS 


sweet, with old maples and oaks and dozens of 
butternut trees loaded with nuts in their sticky green 
hulls. It is strange how the butternuts love to have 
their roots in clefts of rock. All the ledges were 
filled with holes of queer formation. Action of 
water, the Doctor told me, hundreds of centuries 
gone, when all this Champlain valley was ocean bed. 
We sat down to rest on the top of a hill under the 
shade of one of the big, wind-broken butternuts. 
The view was beautiful that bright, still, midsum¬ 
mer day, a day that could have been nothing else 
but Sunday. Below us, the sun glittered on the lake. 
All about were hills with luminous clouds in their 
hair. As far as we could see, were green woods, 
cultivated paler green fields. Hark, church bells on 
the wings of the wind. It must be at Vergennes, I 
thought. It was intensely quiet. 

The following week the Doctor started Ben and 
Jim at the young apple trees. They began by culti¬ 
vating, that is, loosening and making friable the 
earth about their roots. Digging for borers came 
next. Borers are soft-bodied white caterpillars with 
saw-toothed heads. They burrow into the heart- 
wood of young fruit trees, deposit their eggs, and 
rear their larvae, sucking the lifeblood and literally 
sawing in two the little tree. There is danger to 
the apple trees from borers for a number of years. 
For this reason, one must dig them out twice during 
each growing season, in June and in August. A hole 
is cut in the bark, a long wire is bent into a hook at 


APPRENTICESHIP 


109 


the end. The hook is inserted into the tree, the 
borer is impaled on it, and thus drawn out. It is 
easy to see the borers’ work. For at the foot of the 
tree is fine, powdery sawdust. I have seen as many 
as seven or more borers dug out of one poor little 
tree. Sometimes if succor comes too late the tree 
is doomed. Apple trees have a hard time getting to 
maturity, or perhaps, one should say that the grower 
has a harder time bringing them through their vari¬ 
ous times of stress. There are surprisingly many 
such times, and we became intimately acquainted 
with most, all in the day’s work of farming. 

I liked to watch the men at their work. Both Ben 
and Jim were beyond middle age, with furrowed 
faces and bent backs, with the strange manner of 
walk acquired from much ploughing. Both had 
kindly, twinkling blue eyes. Both liked to talk. 
There had been some trouble with the windmill. 
In this way we came to talk about wells and well 
digging. “Ye ever hearn tell abaout th’ way ye 
looks t’ fin’ water?’’ Of course, I had not. “Wall, 
ye take a wilier er a witch hazel rod, an’ ye walk 
along an’ think o’ nothin’, an’ when thet wilier turns 
in yer hand, ’thaout yer doin’ nothin’ t’ make it, 
thet’s th’ place t’ dig fer water. An’ ye’ll fin’ it, 
sur’s th’ world,” said old Ben. “Sure, thet’s so,” 
from Jim, “sure ez we’re a goin’ t’ git rain t’ mor- 
rer. Look et them sundogs.” My education was 
progressing almost faster than I could follow. 
Willow wands of magic, sundogs and rain. I had 


no 


WINGED SEEDS 


enough for one afternoon, and left the men to their 
borers. I hugged myself, hoping I had found out 
something to tell the Doctor, which he did not 
know. He had read of some such thing, as usual. 
“You do not believe any such weird tale, do you?” 
“There are more things in heaven and earth, 
Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” 
And I did not know what he believed. 

Soon after this, came one Williams, digger of 
artesian wells. Quite seriously, he told the wonder 
tale of the willow, and offered to show us. The 
Doctor wanted his well as near to the farmhouse as 
possible. Williams cut his magic wand and we 
watched him walking slowly from the barn, across 
the road, around and over to the farmhouse, and 
all about in many directions. He did this twice 
over, and marked the place, unknown to either of 
us, where the willow branch had turned in his hand. 
The Doctor repeated the performance. I won¬ 
dered just what he was thinking of; probably about 
some defective child in whose development he was 
interested. Suddenly he stood still, to the southeast 
of the house, where the workshop now stands. I 
held my breath. “Thet’s th’ place,” from Williams. 
Our well is within two feet of that identical spot. 
It was sunk during the lat,e autumn and winter, 
after our return to New York. I remember dis¬ 
tinctly when the telegram came announcing that 
water had been reached. “Sights of it.” There 
are things- 



APPRENTICESHIP 


hi 


“After our barns get done, if they ever do, we 
must have a workshop with an anvil and a forge, 
and a grindstone and every possible tool to repair 
and to make things we need on the place. I’ll con¬ 
nect everything up with the gasolene engine, that 
will pump the water out of our Artesian well. We’ll 
have all sorts of saws and wrenches, pipe threading 
tools and bolt cutters, and”—his eyes sparkled. 
“And the neighbors will come in and we’ll help each 
other do things on rainy days and swap stories. 

“Let’s go for a swim, and see how they are get¬ 
ting on with the dock.” They were getting on, I 
suppose. Just then they were dumping stone and 
stone and more stone between the great cross 
beams anchored to the shelving rocks. A retaining 
wall of cement had been built, a type of breakwater 
to keep the ice and storms of winter from damaging 
dock and trees. The Doctor himself was now di¬ 
recting the twenty or more men at work on the 
place. We no longer needed a contractor. He en¬ 
joyed it tremendously, the creative, the executive 
part of it. So did the workers. I marveled where 
on earth he had picked up his accurate knowledge 
of lumber, cement, tools, and a hundred more 
things. 

The men were very fond of him. For instance, a 
mason did some particularly stupid, aggravating 
thing at the end of a dull, hot day in late August. 
One of the days on which everything seems to go 
wrong. The Doctor spoke to him very sharply in- 


11 2 


WINGED SEEDS 


deed, a rare thing. So much so, that I wanted to 
make up for it, and told the man how much unpleas¬ 
antness the day had brought. “Oh, Missus, we like 
turrible t’ hear th’ Doc’ talk. I tol’ him it wuz too 
bad I done wut I done. An’ th’ Doc’, he said: ‘We 
all got t’ cuss oncet in a whil’, an’t we, son?’ ” I 
determined not to waste my sympathy in just that 
way again. 

Our garden was a success despite the late plant¬ 
ing. We had most delicious lettuce, peas, beans, 
carrots, beets, and corn. Vegetables should be 
gathered for a meal just in time for cooking to have 
the best flavor. The sun and the rain and the dew 
and the stars, there is something of all these in their 
indescribable quality, akin to the luscious sweetness 
of wild strawberries and raspberries and black caps. 

The maids too, had a happy time. They wished 
they might stay at the farm forever, until late Sep¬ 
tember, when there were few men about and the eve¬ 
nings grew long and too cool to be out of doors or 
on the lake. The Doctor had bought a boat for 
farm use. The maids had the use of it, and the 
hired men, without asking special leave. We had 
our own skiff and the canoe. The Doctor had 
taught me many years before that hired help, to be 
content and efficient, must have a certain independ¬ 
ence. “We are all equal in our several stations, if 
we do our duty.” His theory worked out surpris¬ 
ingly well in most cases. 

“Want to come and see the columns go up?” he 


APPRENTICESHIP 


1 13 

asked me one Saturday. The columns were to give 
the final touch of “Colonialism,” so to speak, on 
the outside of the Stone House. We had a hard 
time to make the natives, telephone girls, and, in 
fact, anyone say Stone House, not Mansion, as they 
were accustomed to speak of the master’s house 
hereabout. This master did not like the pretense 
of mansion. At each repetition of “mansion,” he 
said: “No, the Stone House.” In the end, he con¬ 
quered, and Stone House it has remained to this 
day. 

The poor columns! They looked so depressed 
lying in a long row, held up by boards placed under 
them; lying in a horizontal position when they 
wanted to stand and hold up a roof. The Doctor 
directed the men and helped at a pinch; the men 
lifted, and I watched, assisted in my watching by 
Scotty. One after the other, the columns went up. 
First came the portico at the south, or drive en¬ 
trance. Then came the turn of the two big porches 
at the sunrise and sunset ends of the house. Up 
to now cedar posts had stayed the roofs, quite ef¬ 
ficiently, it is true, but without pride or beauty. The 
pure white columns looked splendid, as each in 
turn was raised from its ignominious place on the 
ground, and stood up straight, tall, slender, like a 
silver birch in evergreen woods. The work was 
finally over. The men had gone home. Peace fell 
upon us with the dusk. 

After dark, with a myriad stars tangled in the 


WINGED SEEDS 


114 

tree tops, we went out to look at our house with its 
guardian columns in place at last. It was beautiful. 
Although so new in truth, it was old in seeming. It 
melted into the surrounding landscape, like the old 
Winans house we admired so long ago on the eve¬ 
ning we first saw the lake. Nothing jarred, noth¬ 
ing stood out, as if it did not belong. Satisfying 
like the melodic resolution of an intricate chord, 
it was a harmony of gray and green and white. 
Over it all hung the eternal canopy of night and 
stars, beyond the beauty of man’s making. 


CHAPTER ELEVEN 


ADVENTURES IN CLOUD AND RAIN, UNDER SUN 

AND MOON 

I T was raining. “Just the right sort of day to 
take apart the organ and to fix up its woe-be- 
gone innards,” said the Doctor on returning from 
his inspection of the farm and the men. An organ 
is a fearful and a wonderful thing, judging from the 
looks of hall and study and an over-flow in the south 
room when I came upstairs an hour or two later. 
Bolts and screws, parts of metal, parts of wood, 
wide strips and narrow strips, and a hundred more, 
of all shapes and sizes lay about. All were duly 
marked and placed in certain unmistakable posi¬ 
tions. The Doctor stood in the midst of it, sleeves 
rolled up, screw driver in hand, whistling gayly, 
the air filled with blue haze from the pipe evidently 
just laid down. “I’m satisfied that a pipe organ, 
even this miniature one, has more parts than the 
most antediluvian Ichthyosaurus ever invented. You 
won’t want to clean up around here, will you?” 

This conversation having taken place some two 
or three dozen times before, in the course of our 
various adventures, I said: “Oh, no, not to-day. 
When do you expect to get through?” “The gods 


116 


WINGED SEEDS 


only know, I don’t.” This too, had a familiar ring. 
“It’s all marked, so who cares, anyway. Dinner’s 
been ready for an hour or more? Spoilt almost? 
I’ll be ready in two minutes. Let’s have some music 
after dinner.” After a week or two we were again 
able to walk through the hall without fear of doing 
something to some part of that blessed organ. It 
was taken to pieces several times, and in the end 
worked beautifully, and had a splendid tone, al¬ 
though, strange as it may seem, there were three 
parts which would not go back, no matter how hard 
the Doctor tried to find some place where they 
belonged. A year or so later, when we bought our 
big pipe organ, Mason and Hamlin sent up a man to 
install it. The Doctor gave the small organ to a 
Settlement House in which he was interested. The 
organ expert looked it over minutely, to find where 
the offending parts belonged. He found an abiding 
place for all but one, and that evidently must have 
been part of the house, for even the expert could 
not place it inside the instrument or out. 

After dinner we had our music. The Doctor ac¬ 
companied beautifully, when he confined himself to 
the composer and to the composition. But he was 
inordinately fond of improvising, which is hard for 
an ordinary mortal to follow in ensemble unless one 
is a mind reader. He could not see it from my 
point of view at all. “If two people are in 
sympathy-” 

Later we drove to Ferrisburgh, the Centre; for 



ADVENTURES IN CLOUD AND RAIN 117 

there is a Centre, an East, a West, and a North. 
The Centre and the North are jealous of each 
other, for some unexplained, ancient reason. At 
the station, which is at the same time the express 
office, we found our strawberry plants, asparagus 
and rhubarb roots, our currant and raspberry 
bushes. All were carefully packed in burlap wrap¬ 
pings. They came from the nursery of Frederick 
Horsford, in Charlotte, a town north of us, be¬ 
tween Ferrisburgh and Burlington, on the Rutland 
Road. It is pronounced not like the girl’s name, 
but like the Lady of Shalott. I have always ex¬ 
pected something romantic from a town with so 
romantic a name, but apart from Mr. Horsford’s 
splendid perennials, I have never been able to find 
any reason why it should not be called Bridget, or 
something equally prosaic. 

We drove in the Surrey, not anticipating the size 
of the express packages. Coming back, we had to 
leave the seats with the station agent, Charlie Tup- 
per, whose widow now runs our station and express 
business. We sat ignominiously on our precious, 
burlap-wrapped plants. The only one of the party 
who did not like this democratic procedure, was 
Scotty. He objected strenuously. Lady and Sister 
splashed happily along through the clay mud. It 
was amusing to see them come close to an old stump 
fence along the meadow of Mr. Charles Chapman, 
a neighbor of ours. In the country we are neigh¬ 
bors, even if there are two or three miles between 


118 


WINGED SEEDS 


us. In later years we came to know the Chapman 
family intimately. “Mother”—Mr. Chapman al¬ 
ways calls his wife, and in truth, he could not call 
her anything more fitting. She is a gentlewoman, 
placid, sweet-mannered, self-sacrificing, motherly. 
She is the type of woman who makes one feel, that, 
after all, life is pure, worthwhile, beautiful. 

In their short Kentucky life, Lady and Sister had 
never come across anything even faintly resembling 
a stump fence. They showed it plainly. I did not 
like their maner of showing fear and disdain nearly 
as much as the Doctor. Our picturesque stump 
fences date back to pioneer times in old New Eng¬ 
land, when the land was cleared of great pines and 
cedars, the stumps painstakingly dug out and used 
to fence off the land. It was bad agriculture, with¬ 
out doubt. It made hiding places for noxious weeds 
and insect pests. Good, clean, scientific husbandry 
of to-day has wire fences. But how much beauty 
there was in the old, careless ways. 

For instance, a side hill is covered with soft, cop¬ 
pery sorrel. A beautiful sight, but sorrel is the 
sign of acidity in the soil. The decorative side hill 
must be ploughed and limed. Its beauty is irre¬ 
trievably lost in efficiency. Farms must be fenced 
with well set-in posts and woven wire, simple, clean, 
efficient. But how hopelessly ugly this is compared 
with old mossy stone walls covered with wild, trail¬ 
ing things. Or soft, gray split-rail fences that are 
overhung with green things of climbing, clinging 


ADVENTURES IN CLOUD AND RAIN 119 

habit. Most beautiful, most picturesque of all are 
the stump fences, that look like strange, uncouth, 
giant devil-fish things. Look at one closely. The 
outside texture of the wood is a soft green-gray, 
covered with patches of silvery lichen. The inner 
wood is a charming pomegranate pink, satiny, odor¬ 
ous. And when their usefulness as landmarks is 
ended, they make delightfully crackly, fragrant 
fires. Dear old stumps! I have always been sorry 
to see them go in the wake of modern progress. 

We got our plants safely home, and had them 
put in the farmhouse cellar for the night, where it 
was dark and cool. The rain was over. Red-gold 
bars of sunset light streaked woods and hills as we 
drove up to our south entrance, or rather, as we 
splashed up to our south entrance. “Soon as these 
perennial garden things are safely planted, I am 
going to start blazing trees for our drive. Want 
to help?” Did I? He then went on to explain 
that he intended to make the drive just as winding 
as he possibly could. “We’ll have gateposts to 
the southwest of the farmhouse and start the drive 
from there. I’ll make gateposts of concrete, cov¬ 
ered with five-leaved ampelopsis, the same climber 
that you want on the Stone House. It turns to 
crimson flame in autumn, remember? From the 
gateposts through the ravine our drive will be 
straight.” “Through the ravine?” I did not un¬ 
derstand. “Yes, the ravine. I have been poking 
around and with a very little blasting we can make 


120 


WINGED SEEDS 


a sort of Pass of Thermopylae entrance to the 
Stone House drive. This will separate completely 
the farm from our home grounds.” “What about 
the woods?” “I’ll make that drive wind in and out 
between fine big oaks and maples, and beeches and 
elms, not to speak of great birches and cedars. 
Most of them you have never seen. Naturally we 
shall have to cut hundreds of trees. The woods 
will be the better for the thinning out. They are 
so tangled, that many trees do not thrive from 
want of light and air. There will be much stone 
needed, all the remnants of the blasting, and a lot 
more. Eventually we’ll have a sand and gravel 
drive. But that’s a long way off.” 

The Doctor left the planting of the perennials 
to me. “Yours are the apple trees and the gardens. 
Make what you please of them. By the way, I 
have the place all picked out for your rose garden. 
Show you to-morrow. No, to-night, there’ll be a 
moon.” 

The next morning, Jim and Ben reported to me. 
They had already prepared the ground for our 
berry plants. Well-rotted horse manure had been 
spaded in plentifully. It was the last Week of 
August, after a day’s rain, a clouded morning, al¬ 
together ideal setting-out time. Just to undo the 
burlap bundles with their precious contents was ex¬ 
citing. First came the strawberry plants, one hun¬ 
dred of them. They were the most perishable. 
Ben showed me how to take off dead or rotted 


ADVENTURES IN CLOUD AND RAIN 121 


leaves and any weeds that were in the earth around 
the plants. Jim made small holes with his hoe, 
three feet apart, in long straight rows. Into each 
hole I poured water, as much as it would absorb, 
so that the little roots might find nourishment to 
tide them over their rude transplanting. Ben set 
the plants, spread out their rootlets, and firmed the 
dirt around them compactly. Over each plant we 
put two shingles set up against each other, like an 
Indian tepee, so that the hot sun would not wilt 
the baby plant before it felt settled in its new home. 
When we had the hundred plants in place, the effect 
was very business-like. 

Next came the asparagus, of which there were 
one hundred three-year old plants. They are queer¬ 
looking things, like huge, fat spiders. For these, 
holes three feet were dug. An asparagus bed 
is a permanent thing, yielding plentifully for thirty 
or more years, if properly cultivated and cared for. 
“Guess we’d ought t’ git some o’ thet black muck 
outen th’ Slang, t’ put in wi’ them plants.” So I sent 
Jim to hitch up one of the work horses to the dump 
cart and go for a load of the rich silt in the marsh, 
near the Slang Bridge. We covered the asparagus 
roots carefully with wetted burlap, so that they 
should not dry out. Meanwhile we measured for the 
currant bushes along the drive. “My,” said old Ben, 
“it’ll be pretty when them currants git t’ bearin’. 
Th’ll be sights on em.” Ben was a very optimistic 
person, always expecting big fish, splendid harvests, 


122 


WINGED SEEDS 


and fine weather, if he could possibly find the least 
reason for so believing. This was a notable thing. 
As a rule, we found the natives pessimism per¬ 
sonified. No matter what happened, it was cause 
for thinking the worst. Perhaps it is human to be¬ 
lieve in fatality, when one’s livelihood, one’s very 
life is dependent in such great measure upon the 
unforeseen, as is the farmer’s. 

We set each currant bush four feet from its neigh¬ 
bor to give room for the bushes to grow. At ma¬ 
turity, set in this wise, they would make a continu¬ 
ous hedge of rich green, at bearing time hung with 
scarlet berries. There would be enough for the 
Stone House, for our farm family, and some for the 
robins. As before, we dug a deep hole, so that the 
roots could spread out comfortably in their bed. 
We mixed fertilizer with the earth, poured in 
water generously and planted the seedling. The 
long row of slender canes stood up bravely. Jim 
got back at noon with his load of rich black dirt 
from the marsh. “Gosh,” he said, “this here stuff’s 
richer’n a gol’ mine. Erie’s feelin’ good, most a 
dumped me an’ th’ cart daown int’ th’ Slang.” Erie 
and Pa were the second work team the Doctor had 
bought. They were Percheron bred. They came, 
as their names implied, from Erie, Pennsylvania. 

When I returned after luncheon, dinner, as our 
neighbors call it, the two men had a row of holes 
ready for my asparagus roots. They were set in 
deep, and covered up, so that nothing showed but 


ADVENTURES IN CLOUD AND RAIN 123 

a circular mound of loose-looking earth marked 
with a stake. “Naow, we’ll giv’ ’em a dose o’ 
coarse salt, so’s t’ keep daown th’ weeds.” This 
seemed a queer thing. The majority of plants are 
killed by salt. The roots of asparagus are deeper 
below the surface than most, and the plant above 
ground is cut, as it develops. 

Next came six plants of rhubarb, another peren¬ 
nial, set in the southerly end of our garden. Pie 
plant, Vermonters call it, is by nature a swamp 
growth, loves moisture, and is a rank feeder. It 
needs all the richness it can get to thrive. Last 
of all, we set out the raspberry canes. They looked 
much like the currant seedlings. Of these we 
planted three rows in a line with the young apple 
trees, thereby separating our garden into oblong 
plots. By chore time, five o’clock, our work was 
done. “They certainly ought to do well, we have 
taken so much trouble with our planting,” I said 
to the men. “Gosh,” answered Jim, “don’t see’s 
why th’ hadn’t ought ter, with thet black muck an’ 
all. Thet’s bettern all yer boughten stuff anny- 
ways.” 

The Doctor, meanwhile, had been blazing trees 
for his drive. He was tremendously elated about 
it, and said before he got through with it, it was 
going to be a wonder of a drive. And he had some 
news. He had bought a thirty-acre meadow from 
Mr. Scranton. It included the ledge pasture with 
the butternut trees and the beautiful view. The 


124 


WINGED SEEDS 


new purchase adjoined our land on the south. 
“Think of it, Mr. Scranton had never seen that 
ledge until I took him there.” I asked what he 
intended doing with the thirty acres. “Apple trees, 
apple trees.” 

At night, by moonlight he took me out to the 
“rose garden.” What he showed me was a thicket 
of big cedars and pine and silver birch within sight 
and sound of the lake. “Here,” I asked, “in the 
woods?” “Out there will be a turn in our drive,” 
out there being just then deep black, shadowy trees, 
bright-streaked with moon rays. “Where we stand, 
will be the center of your garden. Want a sun 
dial?” It was too wonderful. “Many of these 
trees, of course, must be felled,” the Doctor con¬ 
tinued. “We’ll leave this one silver birch for con¬ 
trast. These splendid arbor vitae will make a 
natural wall and windbreak, on all but the south 
side, which will be open. I’ll make a clearing 
there, and plant a small orchard. In this way your 
rose garden will be sunny and protected, walled in 
by trees, in the midst of evergreen woods. Beyond 
the trees is the lake, so that you may hear its 
music while you work among your roses, yet they 
will be guarded from every harsh wind. We’ll 
plant a hedge of old-timey natives for a screen be¬ 
tween the drive and your garden. I’d prefer the 
cinnamon rose, the many-leaved, fragrant little 
pink rose of our grandmothers’ time. I shall do 
it for you, ‘soon ’s I can get around to it,’ as our 


ADVENTURES IN CLOUD AND RAIN 125 

neighbors hereabout would say.” For the man of 
dreams, it was a reality. He visualized things so 
clearly. For me there were mysterious, night- 
black shadows. There was bright, silver-blue 
moonlight, with somewhere, sometime, in a dim, 
hazy future, the fragrance of roses. 

The dock was practically finished. Crushed 
stone had been put on top of the big anchor stones. 
This was in turn covered with rough concrete. It 
looked as if it had grown onto the rocks, as if it 
had always been there, like the Stone House in 
its green and gray setting. “Next summer we’ll get 
a new launch and build a boathouse to keep it un¬ 
der cover.” No, he would never finish. It was 
certain. 

The men who had been working on the dock, 
were now put to work on the drive. They cut 
down trees, blazed by the Doctor. When a cer¬ 
tain number were felled, they were hauled over to 
the woodpile, at the edge of the cedar woods to 
the north of our farmhouse. The brush was 
burned in the woods. After two or three days, I 
began at last to see, and to remember Mr. Platt’s 
lovely water color showing the Stone House set 
in lawns with a turn-around and a drive. The Doc¬ 
tor spent the greater part of several weeks right 
with the men, for fear of losing even a single fine 
tree. Then too, as each clearing came into being, 
it opened new vistas. Here was creative work he 
loved; and always he had the fragrant smell of 


126 


WINGED SEEDS 


the conifers, the radiant sun and sky of September, 
the sound of the wind in the trees, the murmur of 
the lake. 

It was strangely interesting to see the various 
turns of the drive emerge slowly out of the ever¬ 
green wilderness. All this, remember, was deep 
woods, a good deal of it was virgin woods with 
brambles, creepers, vines of every description, 
forest growth in tangly thickets. The very thought 
of making a path, curved or straight, seemed won¬ 
derful. To think of blazing a wide carriage drive 
through this wild tangle of green, truly required 
imagination, vision. 

They came upon partridge and quail, upon 
ground birds and screech owls. I was sorry for 
the wild things disturbed and hunted from their 
homes. “No matter,” he said. “It is not their 
mating season. They will all remain near, only 
they will go deeper into the woods, up the trail, 
beyond the ravine, where you have never been. I’ll 
take you there sometime. It is the wildest, the 
the most beautiful part of our farm. Somewhere, 
along there, above and close to the lake shore, there 
was once an old Indian trail.” They came upon 
sapphire-blue closed gentians, upon the lovely 
fringed orchis with its apple blossom hues, upon 
rattlesnake plaintain with its striped leaves, upon 
thick mats of partridge vine and its scarlet berries, 
upon clumps of fern, and more charming wildings. 
The Doctor protected every mossy rock, every 


ADVENTURES IN CLOUD AND RAIN 127 

tiniest flower, that could be saved. I do not think 
I ever saw him so happy except, perhaps, when a 
problem case among his patients became clear to 
him: as he expressed it, “when he got the combina¬ 
tion.” Or, yes, years later, when he drove Madge 
Wildfire in a race and won it. 

“Gosh darn it, Doc’, caint see what in hell ye 
want this here road o’ yourn so gosh blamed 
crooked fer. Looks t’ me julluk a road made outen 
a keg o’ hard cider.” To which the Doctor an¬ 
swered, that possibly the crooked road would some 
day lead the way to a keg of something hot. 

We never mentioned going home to New York, 
although it was in both our minds constantly. The 
time was drawing near. Our grain was stacked in 
the meadows. Our ^orn was cut, and stood in great, 
yellowish-green stooks, looking for all the world 
like a village of Indian wigwams. Our Northern 
Spys and Baldwins were beginning to burnish their 
cheeks. Maples and beeches were touched with 
Loki’s staff of fire. There was a tang of autumn 
in the bright air. There were noticeably few bird 
voices in the woods and about the house. Duck 
hunting season had opened. 

One night toward the end of September we went 
spearing. It was my first experience with this type 
of fishing. Ben was an expert fisherman. He knew 
the ins and outs of the lake and the marshes, knew 
the haunts of pike and pickerel and muscallonge. 
We waited until night fell, A gasolene torch was 


128 


WINGED SEEDS 


attached to the bow of our flat-bottomed fishing 
boat. It threw into weird relief trees and rocks, 
shore line and water. I sat in the middle of the 
boat with Scotty, at our accustomed passive job 
of watching. Ben poled the boat slowly, very 
slowly in and out of bays and inlets, hugging closely 
the tree-fringed shore. The Doctor and Jim stood 
at each end with a three-pronged spear on a 
long pole, like Neptune’s trident, grasped tightly. 
The night was star-lit, still. The wind barely 
rippled the crystal-clear water. In the shallow 
bays, the lake bottom was clearly visible; one mo¬ 
ment brilliantly lighted by our torch, the next, in 
deep, mysterious darkness. There was something 
uncanny in the black aloofness of the murmuring, 
gurgling water, the lurid light of the torch, the 
strange, shifting shadows. Here, we saw pebbly 
bottom with fish of all sorts quiescent, or in quick¬ 
gliding motion, as they sensed the paddle, noise¬ 
lessly as Ben used it, or when they saw the light. 
There, was pure white sand with soft-water clams 
slowly closing and unclosing their housing shell. 

At last! Jim jabbed his prongs into a huge, 
snaky eel and dropped him squirming into a pail 
behind him. His mate glided away, swimming 
quickly. Eels usually lie on the lake bottom in 
pairs. “Pike, Doc’, a big un, ahead o’ ye there. 
Gosh, he’s got ’way fr’m ye! No, good fer ye, ye 
got ’im.” The Doctor did not speak, as the big 
fish splashed into the pail, but he took out his clasp 


ADVENTURES IN CLOUD AND RAIN 129 

knife and put the struggling, gasping creature out 
of its misery. We paddled gradually up to Little 
Otter Creek, and were soon on the sand bar south 
and west of Gardiner’s Island, just at the edge of 
the reedy weeds. We got both pike and pickerel 
and more eels. It is fairly exciting sport, but like 
duck hunting for the Doctor and me, it was the high 
lights and magic shadows, the colorful stillness, the 
beauty of the spangled sky, the dim, sleeping trees 
we loved. All these things meant infinitely more to 
us than the spearing. The marsh, particularly, was 
magically beautiful, like a stage setting for some 
Oriental love scene in a starry wilderness. It is 
strange that the’most subtly moving things in nature 
remind one of beauty in art, its counterfeit. The 
men docked our boat, and led the way with our 
string of fish, threaded on a forked stick. They 
held up the torch to light us through the black night 
of the pines. It was very late. 

“Let’s watch the moonrise. Play something. 
Oh, ‘Tristan.’ ” I did. Silver rays lit up the dim¬ 
ness of the room, and brought into cameo relief 
the ivory and black keyboard. “Come on, your 
Tristan is an anemic creature in that third act. 
Here is your moon, that’s something like.’’ A wide 
path of lustrous moonlight divided into two our 
star-lit bay. It showed in crystal-clear relief black 
shadow and silver light, triumphant keys of nature 
on which God makes the music of the spheres. 


CHAPTER TWELVE 


A NEW YEAR’S VISIT AT THE FARM AND 

NEIGHBORS 

H OW we hated to close the Stone House the 
last day of September! “Never mind,” said 
the Doctor, “some day we shall see this gorgeous 
scarlet and gold turn to soft browns and yellows, 
shall see the year’s fulfillment, the harvest’s end, 
the coming of snow and winter silence. We’ll get 
it all. There’s nothing like having things left to 
wish for.” 

Reports came weekly. On the whole, they were 
satisfactory. At Christmas we received a unique 
gift from a patient and friend of ours, Mrs. De 
Mauriac, who had a farm at Allendale, New Jersey. 
She sent us a pair of pure-bred Chester White 
shoats. Nothing could have pleased us better. 
The piggies were sent up to the farm with minute 
directions for their care. 

New Year’s day happened on a Sunday. In our 
country of the free, that means an extra holiday. 
We determined to go up to the lake for the two 
days, and have a lark. We found fires burning, and 
the Stone House comfortably warm. We made a 
huge driftwood fire in the drawing room. I got 

130 






Frozen Spindrift 


A NEW YEAR’S VISIT 


I 3 I 

our meals in the kitchen, and served the first one 
in the dining room. “Anything the matter with 
the kitchen?” asked the Doctor. “Why not eat 
right there? It will be like a picnic, and besides 
it will be so much easier for you. Between you 
and me, it’s a comfort to have no maids around 
for once.” The kitchen was nice. I had taken 
great pride in furnishing it with curtained windows 
and cupboards, with a long white dresser, on which 
stood old-blue china cereal jars in orderly rows. 
Its windows looked out over the ice-bound lake, the 
green snow-topped hills, the green, snow-filled 
woods. It was flooded with sunshine. A kitchen 
is a homey place. No matter how much we may 
want formal living for general purposes, coming 
down to elemental things occasionally is a change 
and a relief. Deep down in my heart, I was glad 
to show off my domestic ability to the Doctor, who 
said nothing, but saw every last little thing. 

It was fun wading through deep, dry, powdery 
snow. It was fun feeding suet and crumbs to the 
chickadees and the snow buntings. It was fun going 
through barns and feeding apples to horses and to 
hens. I never could find anything that cows seemed 
to relish outside of feeding time. Everything was 
joyous in the glittery bright-blue air. Lady and 
Sister were delighted to see us and whinnied hap¬ 
pily. They had both been bred during the early 
summer to a trotting stallion of excellent lineage, 
Major Axtell. If all went well, early June would 


132 


WINGED SEEDS 


bring their colts. Think of it! The pasture we 
had dreamed of so long ago, was ours. We too 
would soon have mother mares with suckling baby 
colts, grazing in a grassy field surrounded by blue 
hills, like Will Kimball’s at Basin Harbour! 

We found all our stock in good condition, only 
Pa seemed listless, as if he did not care whether 
school kept or not. Erie, his mate, was in fine 
mettle. “Guess, I was taken in on that deal,” said 
the Doctor. “Pa is fairly aged.” Horse deals are 
curious things. The buyer beware. Honesty is 
little considered, even between otherwise good 
friends. David Harum understood this when he 
said “we’re all fairly good liars when it comes to 
what we don’t tell about a horse.” 

We went to the hog pen to see our Chester Whites 
in their new home. Judging from the way they ate 
their food, they felt acclimatized in their present 
environment. They had a pen with a concrete 
trough at one end, near a window, and a clean bed 
of straw at the farthest end toward the wall. Hogs 
are much maligned beasts. If given clean straw to 
sleep on, unlike most other animals, they will never 
soil it. They like filth no better than most. They 
are happiest and thrive and grow infinitely better 
in airy quarters kept decently clean, with a yard for 
exercise and for air. Sometime, the Doctor told 
me, he intended to have a large number of hogs, 
and to let them graze in the open. He explained 
that hogs do better on range, make quicker and 


A NEW YEAR’S VISIT 


133 

therefore cheaper gain in flesh than they do when 
the expense of housing is added to that of feed¬ 
ing with grain exclusively. If reared under cover, 
hogs must be kept clean and fed with carefully 
wetted food, rather than with table refuse. The 
latter is excellent for hens, if kept sweet. Hogs 
thrive on ground grain, barley, or white middlings 
and skim milk. White middlings is one of the by¬ 
products of wheat, the most wonderful of all 
grains. 

We say wheat unthinkingly, yet about wheat 
there is romance and story before it ever reaches 
grain elevators and the romance and the adventure 
of big business. Wheat stands for so many things. 
To begin with, there is the little, hard seed. At 
harvest time it has developed into a plant of grace 
and beauty. The cycle goes on to its fulfillment of 
fine flour and coarse, of middlings and bran. Be¬ 
sides these four products gained from the head, 
there is the golden straw made by the stalks of the 
wheat plant. All these wondrous things for the 
preservation of human life and growth sprung 
from tiny, hard seeds laid into black earth and fos¬ 
tered by sun and rain and wind and dew. In truth, 
seeds are winged things, are God-given things. 

“Let’s go for a sleigh ride in the new cutter, stop 
in to greet the Chapmans, and make our long-prom¬ 
ised call on the Robinsons.” Splendid! The roads 
were hard-packed, making the finest kind of sleigh¬ 
ing. It was a perfect winter day, without wind. 


134 


WINGED SEEDS 


Lady and Sister pranced and pirouetted. It took 
some driving to hold them down to earth. They 
too felt the exhilaration of the radiant sky and the 
crystal-pure snow air. There is a tonic sort of 
happiness in a sunny winter day. There are no 
grays, no half-tones. The unsullied snow covers 
everything sordid. Things stand out strangely 
clear with sharply marked outlines etched in black 
and white, in blue and gold. Snow-laden evergreens 
seem more intimate than they are in their summer 
dress of green aloofness. The hills, too, in the blue 
haze of summer, seem far away. In the winter 
landscape, they draw magically close and enfold the 
snow-covered valley with protecting nearness. 
What a glorious day! “Like it, happy?” the Doc¬ 
tor asked. Just then I was too happy to speak. 

We reached the bridge over the Slang. How dif¬ 
ferent the marsh seems in winter. Its manifold 
green has turned into snow-frosted, blue-white ice, 
brown willow-fringed shore, dull yellow muskrat 
houses among frozen, deeper yellow reeds. The 
muskrat houses are made of reeds and rushes, and 
are cleverly built to float with the flow of the stream. 
So often I have heard city dwellers speak of the 
dreariness, the deadness of things of the country in 
winter. Dreariness, deadness! With such intoxi¬ 
cating air, such magic of color! Color, ranging 
from the pale yellows of the rushes to the red 
browns of the willows and the swamp maples; from 
the cold, deep blue of the ice to the warm, rosy lilac 


A NEW YEAR’S VISIT 


i35 

of distance. Over all this is hung the brilliant, daz¬ 
zling sun and sky. It looks like a German Christ¬ 
mas card, all a-glitter. We just flew along, bells 
jingling, horses tossing their heads, snow flying all 
about us. Ahead of us was the turn in the road, 
marked by one of our dear old pre-Revolutionary 
red schoolhouses. It looked homey and old- 
fashioned with its bright red bricks, its green-shut¬ 
tered, small-paned windows, and its great wood- 
pile of white and yellow birch. We arrived at the 
Chapmans, and were welcomed with their usual hos¬ 
pitality. We were asked to stay to tea, but we 
knew we should never see the Robinsons, if we got 
out at all. We drove on past the windbreak of 
great spruce which Mr. Chapman has planted along 
the side hill beyond his land, on through the hollow 
with the Little Otter in the distance, and the Green 
Mountains beyond. Camel’s Hump and Mount 
Mansfield stood out clear and black against the 
sparkling winter sky. We drove across the railroad 
track, down the hill and over the old bridge. Far 
below us the stream, wrapped in ice and snow, was 
in its winter sleep. In spring it would awake and 
be a torrent, rushing noisily over tumbled rocks. 
The beautiful falls on our right were silent, frozen 
spindrift. 

Now we were come to the cross roads at the 
Centre, with the railroad station at our left. At 
the corner was the blacksmith shop of Albert Le 
Grand, an excitable little Frenchman, fond of music, 


136 WINGED SEEDS 

always cheerful, a lover of horses and of jokes. He 
is a good blacksmith, and he makes a well-fitting 
shoe. His hammer rings melodiously as he shapes 
the red-glowing shoe for my mare; at the same time 
he discusses the comparative merits of the Mozart 
and the Verdi Requiem. Both these stupendous 
works he has heard in his youth at the Madeleine 
in Paris with his teacher, Alexandre Guilmant, at 
the organ. Or he speaks enthusiastically of the ap¬ 
proach to the Paris Opera house and a perform¬ 
ance of Lucia di Lammermoor. Above the falls 
\yas the saw mill of old Oliver Danyou. Beyond 
the mill was the Creamery; even then it was sadly 
in need of a coat of paint, which it has not received 
to this day. 

We turned east and then north and were on the 
main road to Burlington and Montreal. This was 
Ferrisburgh Centre with its white and green-shut¬ 
tered houses, with its Town Hall that had once been 
a church. It still looked somewhat like a Meeting 
House, with red brick and white trimmings, Gothic 
windows and Colonial doorways. It is a queer mix¬ 
ture of old Gothic and modern Colonial. Withal 
it has a certain charm and individuality, and might 
be made into a lovely thing. It is set among old 
maples on a green, like all New England village 
greens. A little farther on was the General Store 
and Postoffice, where one could buy anything from 
gloves and needles and spades to kerosene and 
sugar and oranges, not to mention picture postals, 


A NEW YEAR’S VISIT 


i37 


ink, and stamps, when they were not “out of it,” 
which was a frequent occurrence. All these varied 
and seemingly arduous duties did not prevent the 
storekeeper and postmaster from fishing and hunt¬ 
ing in their respective seasons. He never made an 
impression of haste. In fact, things are very 
leisurely in our township, and he was of it. 

“Did you ever see anything lovelier than our 
valley to-day? The hills are more beautiful in 
each new aspect. To-day, in their winter color, 
they are no longer soft, azure blue. They are royal 
purple, almost black.” We drove on past more 
white and green farm houses, for about two miles, 
up a very slow, gradual rise. One would hardly 
have noticed any grade, except that the view over 
the valley grew wider as we went on. I had never 
been to the Town Clerk’s. The Robinson house 
was set back from the road, at the top of a hill. 
We turned into a drive lined on both sides with 
stately, old, wind-broken Lombardy poplars, trees 
of dignity pointing their tall spires straight up to 
the sky, like Gothic spires and Cathedral windows. 
It was a stony road, leading up to the quaint, brown 
house. In its setting of snow, it looked like a print 
of a dwelling in an old-fashioned story. 

The house was old, built by the forefathers of 
the present Rowland Robinson, the third of his 
name. He was the son of Rowland E. Robinson, 
known in the world of literature for his stories of 
local life and color. The farmer, writer, and artist, 


WINGED SEEDS 


138 

for he was a painter as well, had died some years 
before this. His wife, Mrs. Anna Robinson, took 
upon herself all the cares of their farm, the duties 
of Town Clerk of Ferrisburgh, and at the same time 
had been her husband’s faithful amanuensis, during 
his years of blindness, his eyes as well as his hands. 

Mrs. Robinson came forward to greet us. She 
was beautiful, with hair parted smoothly over a 
splendid, high-bred face, with the sweet, quiet man¬ 
ner of the Quakers from whom she had sprung. 
Hers was a face and form that looked as if it had 
walked out from between the covers of a daguer¬ 
reotype. It was a revelation to meet a woman of 
her type in the depth of the country, a woman whose 
presence would have graced any home, any com¬ 
munity. She used the endearing thee and thou of 
the Quakers, and welcomed us with gracious hos¬ 
pitality, leading the way into a delightful, book- 
lined library, with old family portraits on the walls, 
with a glorious view of the valley and the lake, and 
the hills. We had tea in a raftered old dining room, 
black with age, with a deep Colonial brick fireplace, 
the kind of fireplace that George Washington 
described as toasting one’s face, while one’s back 
was chilled. The fire dogs and tongs, the shovel 
and poker were hand-forged. There were brass 
warming pans and other family heirlooms on the 
walls. Dear Mrs. Robinson! She was as delighted 
to meet the Doctor as we were to meet her. We 
promised each other many such visits. Alas! 


A NEW YEAR’S VISIT 


139 


Life was full for us all. We did not see half 
enough of this unusually fine personality, rich in 
culture of mind, rich in knowledge and experi¬ 
ence of life. She showed us over her interest¬ 
ing old house with its many relics. The Quakers 
of Vermont had sympathized greatly with the 
Southern negro. They helped fugitive slaves to 
get safely across the border into Canada. In the 
attic of the Robinson house was a secret room in 
which many a poor black man had lain hidden and 
had been fed. One of Rowland Robinson’s stories 
deals with this theme. “Out of Bondage” is the 
story of an old man, a hunted slave, who enters into 
the freedom that comes to us all, the freedom of 
death. 

From every side of the Robinson house the view 
was beautiful. It gave over hilly sheep pastures 
to the Green Mountains on one side, on the other, 
it had the smiling Addison valley view of lake and 
Adirondack hills. “Yes, it is lovely in our quiet 
valley,” said Mrs. Robinson, as she helped to 
bundle me into my wraps. “We are so glad you 
have come to live with us. Your coming means 
much to our community.” We drove away, down 
the hill between the tall poplars toward the west, 
into the setting sun. Said the Doctor: “Think of 
meeting this high type of intellectual woman, this 
gracious lady here in the country. I wonder if the 
township appreciates her.” We grew to be great 
friends, all three. I loved her dearly. To have 


140 


WINGED SEEDS 


known and been permitted to love her was one of 
the privileges of my life. For Mrs. Robinson, too, 
life ended in blindness and in pain. To the very 
last, she remained vitally interested in the world of 
our small community, in the great world outside. 
We have no one in all our township to fill her place. 
She was gentle, beautiful, strong. 

We-drove on into the sunset with shadow lights 
turning from molten gold and copper red to soft 
lilac and cold blue. The radiant brilliance of the 
winter day had faded. It grew cold and gray and 
dim. We were glad when we came to the five oaks 
on Chester Hawkins’ land that marked the turn 
toward the lake and home. Ben had fires glowing 
when we entered the Stone House and he had 
lighted the big lamp in the hall. It was good to get 
in out of the dusk and the cold, good to know that 
we had been out. It had been an interesting, pro¬ 
vocative afternoon, filled with new impressions, 
filled with color. “Remember Walter, dear Wal¬ 
ter, and his saying: ‘Show you the most beautiful 
place in the world?’ We are finding it out for 
ourselves.” We saw Walter and his enthusiasm for 
all things rare in the leaping tongues of flame of 
our driftwood fire, and in the dancing shadows on 
the walls. Those we love are with us. Their spirit 
lives on in our daily lives, as if it had never flown. 


CHAPTER THIRTEEN 


FARM HAPPENINGS AND STONE HOUSE GUESTS 

I N February we sent up two men from New York 
to the Stone House to do the final painting and 
decorating. I went to the farm once or twice dur¬ 
ing their stay to look after the work. They were 
glad indeed to see me, were “fearful lonesome.” 
They thought it must be fine in the country in the 
summer time. Now it seemed to them cold and 
desolate. They sorely missed the lights and the 
diversions and the noises of the big city. “Not even 
a trolley to let ye know ye’re alive. Give me little 
ol’ N’ York,” said the younger man, a tall Swede. 
What life means, its joys and its beauties, is all in 
the point of view. However, they did excellent 
work, giving woodwork and ceilings a delightful 
warm, creamy, dull finish and. putting on papers 
faultlessly. 

One Monday morning in early April the Doctor 
returned from his farm visit with news. He had 
purchased another thirty-acre meadow. “More 
apple trees. I’m having good old Mr. Benton scout 
around for more land, tillable land for meadow 
and pasture. I’m aching to get our horse breeding 
started; and I do not wish to wait with our tree 


142 


WINGED SEEDS 


planting either. Our orchards must be started into 
growth.” I was far beyond any remonstrance by 
this time. In the first place, the farm meant all the 
world to us both. It was a godsend for the Doctor, 
joy, adventure, creative work, relaxation. It stood 
for all these and much more. Most things in life 
are a state of mind; and of all states of mind, land 
hunger is one of the strangest passions. It is like 
the taste of blood for the tiger. “This year we’ll 
close up shop here on the first of May, even if I 
shall have to go down to New York twice a week 
for a short time. I want to get that new thirty- 
acre meadow started right, and I want to be on the 
job myself. The neighbors are prophesying dire 
failure. ‘The land really is low for fruit growing. 
It needs tile drainage and ditches. We’ll baby the 
young trees in the crucial time of their life and re¬ 
plant dead ones. We’ll try to show these farmers 
a thing or two by bringing the land into a high state 
of fertility. Anyone can grow an orchard in a 
favorable situation. The fun of it is doing the 
stunt with every obstacle possible to keep one guess¬ 
ing. Something like a successful marriage. Things 
must not run too smoothly. Monotony gets on 
one’s nerves, especially when allied with virtue that 
sticks out like the ‘quills on the fretful porcupine.’ 
Well, five or six years more of medical life and 
work, and then we’ll move to the farm with all our 
best-beloved possessions, for good and all. How 
does that sHke you?” 


FARM HAPPENINGS 


143 


All this, while carefully he was holding a test 
tube over the Bunsen burner and watching its con¬ 
tents turn cloudy. Unlike many busy physicians, the 
Doctor did all his pathological work himself. Even 
at the Stone House there was a laboratory in the 
attic, with modern scientific appliances of many 
kinds. He said there were reactions so infinites¬ 
imally slight, that they would barely be reported by 
the expert pathologists. Yet these seemingly un¬ 
important details, seen personally, in their sequence, 
at times threw a bright light on an otherwise ob¬ 
scure diagnosis. 

We arrived at the Stone House in the middle of 
the night instead of at six o’clock, owing to a 
train wreck ahead of us. As is the delightful rule 
of railroad employees, we were told nothing defin¬ 
ite. We read it next day in the papers. It was mid¬ 
night, with a clouded moon, shadowy, and cold, 
cold as charity. This was winter, not spring. We 
had hot coffee and sandwiches, and gradually got 
thawed out sitting by a roaring woodfire. By the 
time the maids went to bed, and the house settled 
down to quiet, it was three o’clock. “What is the 
use of going to bed now?” said the Doctor. “Let’s 
watch the moon set and dawn rise.” He hated bed¬ 
time almost as much as a child. We loitered 
through the dim, strangely silent woods. The 
bare-branched trees loomed ghostly in the waning 
moonlight. There was still broken ice in the lake, 
and the water looked black and forbidding. Spring 


144 


WINGED SEEDS 


and awakening seemed very far away. The trees 
were asleep in the gloom. Even the pines were 
gray, not green. Indeterminate sounds made more 
noticeable the pale silence about us. We watched 
the moon sink slowly below the western hills. It 
was cold, depressing, with a weird, thin light be¬ 
ginning to outline the skeleton trees, like daylight 
slowly making havoc of artificial light in a chamber 
of death. I shivered. “Perhaps bed would not be 
so bad, just now?” “Bad! You aren’t much of a 
sport; just spineless, with a jellyfish backbone. 
However, it will seem good to stretch out for a bit.” 
At any rate, there was not much of spring gold in 
that raw, blue light. Cubists, futurists, dadaists, 
and their ilk might love it and put into it all sorts of 
things that no sane mortal could find. 

Five or six hours later the world had changed. 
We had slept, we were rested, and the sun shone 
radiantly. Already the long, strenuous winter had 
receded into hazy distance. It was so delightful a 
homecoming to countless interesting, beautiful, real, 
and elusive things. Our neighbors telephoned wel¬ 
comes. We were now residents, no longer new¬ 
comers. They knew we had come to stay and to 
do things. They were glad, and showed it. All 
outdoors was blue as blue. The air was filled with 
what Bliss Carman calls “filmy gold.” There was 
the indescribable earthy smell of resurrection. Oh, 
it was a good world to be alive in! The cubist 
moonset and cold dawn was past. We were on the 


FARM HAPPENINGS 


i45 


farm for the beginning of things. We would see 
the setting of trees, the seeding of grain. I was 
planning to start my hardy garden east of the sun¬ 
rise porch. I would help to set hens. Three colts 
were expected, Lady’s, Sister’s, and one of the 
workmare’s. Each day was filled to the brim with 
exciting, splendid happenings, adventures all. 
There was still much to be done on the drive. The 
Doctor expected to put up his concrete gateposts, 
to rebuild and to enlarge the horse barn, and a hun¬ 
dred other things equally absorbing. 

First of all, after looking over our stock, we went 
to see the farm tools we had bought. They came 
from the International Harvester Company and 
from our friend, David Hays of New York, who 
exports agricultural implements to the Argentine. 

We had here a reaper and binder, a seed drill, 
riding and walking cultivators and ploughs, hay 
forks, rakes, both plain and side delivery, and as 
many more. The Doctor whistled gaily. His eyes 
sparkled. “What fun it will be to set these up on 
rainy and on lowery days!” It looked to me like a 
thousand-piece puzzle picture. 

The trees had come. They had been carefully 
heeled in, and were to be planted directly. This 
time the Doctor had bought dynamite, and the 
holes were blasted instead of dug. There were 
many hundreds of trees to be set out. There would 
be no time for little touching rites of prayer like the 
old French Canadian’s. Modern scientific efficiency 


146 


WINGED SEEDS 


does lack a certain leisurely romance. A tractor- 
drawn reaper has in it something awakened, big, 
compelling, yet a certain quiet beauty is gone for¬ 
ever with the scythe and the flail, a friendly human¬ 
ness, as it were. The smell of gasolene and kero¬ 
sene, the noisy, puffing, breathless tractor, the rattle 
of machinery prevent one’s hearing the rustle of 
wings, the odorous wind in the trees, the murmur¬ 
ing water. 

Instead of the quiet digging of holes with the 
spade or a posthole digger, noisy blasts shook the 
golden-still air. I told the Doctor what I thought 
of his dynamite. He laughed. “I knew you would 
hate it. You belong to medieval times, along about 
the Crusades. Never mind. Listen to our Fifth 
Symphony bird.” This was a sweet-voiced bird, 
who was nesting in the drive, in the future rose gar¬ 
den. I called her a song sparrow. The Doctor 
thought she was one of the warblers. She regularly 
began her song with the first theme of Beethoven’s 
Fifth, absolutely correct in tone and in rhythm. We 
loved to hear her, and hoped she would teach her 
babies the theme. 

Our currants and raspberries had begun to leaf 
out. Apple trees and berry bushes had been 
sprayed for the first time with lime sulphur and 
arsenate of lead. By the middle of May we had a 
“mess” of asparagus. It is the most delicious thing. 
No one, who has not tasted the green, purple¬ 
headed spears, straight cooked out of the garden, 


FARM HAPPENINGS 


i47 


knows their real flavor. Our rhubarb did not look 
happy. Strange to say, I have since tried it all 
over the farm and cannot seem to make it thrive as 
it should. I tried covering it in early spring with 
half barrels filled with well-rotted manure, and 
more forcing stunts. To no avail. My neighbors 
say, “I have bad luck with pie plant.” The prob¬ 
ability is that I make some mistake, or perhaps 
there is some element wanting in the soil. 

We got in our black onion seed for late onions, 
and our onion sets for early ones; our first peas and 
early potatoes, our carrots and beets and lettuce and 
radishes; also spinach, chard, and the rest of the 
frost-resisting seeds. Beans, both wax and Limas, 
egg plant, corn and squash and cucumbers, melons 
and pumpkins had to wait until there was no longer 
danger from a late frost. Meanwhile they were 
ploughing my flower garden. Wheat for our own 
flour was already showing tender green spears above 
ground. The earlier one can get one’s wheat sown, 
the better the harvest is apt to be. Oats were 
seeded. The seed bed was being prepared for bar¬ 
ley and speltz, for corn and millet. The Doctor 
sprayed all his seed grain with a solution of formal¬ 
dehyde, contrary to the advice of our hired men 
“Never heerd tell o’ no sich thing. What’s th’ use 
o’ it, anny ways? Much good they boughten stuff’ll 
do ye, ef we git no rain in June, er a pest o’ locusts.” 
Spraying was done just the same. 

Lady and Sister, and Whiteface, the workmare, 


WINGED SEEDS 


148 

were all three put into pasture to await the coming 
of their colts. The Doctor did not believe in work¬ 
ing or driving them within four weeks, at least, of 
their parturition. There were nine piggies in the 
hog pen. Our Chester Whites, inappropriately 
named Sir Launcelot and Lady Guinevere, had a 
happy family of nine babies. They were cunning 
pink-white things with funny curled-up tails. It was 
interesting to watch them with the mother sow. 
Each one had its own teat, for a brood sow has as 
many teats giving milk, as she has babies to feed. 
Sir Launcelot was banished from his family circle 
for the time being, for fear he should chance to 
fancy a delicate morsel of piggy. He might not 
scruple to devour one of his own. 

Dearest of all was watching the swelling of leaf 
buds, their bursting, the coming to delicate tracery, 
to baby leaf, to full green richness of color and of 
form; to watch cloudy veils of mauve and gray turn 
to distinct outline of bud and leaf. The willows 
and poplars began the procession. Then came the 
elms and the maples and beeches. Last of all the 
shagbarks and the oaks and ash leafed out. Each 
tree hangs out feathery, differently-shaped and 
colored bud tassels. Out of these charming bud 
tassels fly the winged seeds, nature’s wondrous pro¬ 
vision for future trees. All seeds are carried on 
the wings of the wind, but many tree seeds have their 
own propellers. Winged seeds are given to the 
maples, the elders, the elms and basswood, the pines 


FARM HAPPENINGS 


149 


and firs, the birches and poplars. It is quite mar¬ 
velous to watch seeds with wings in action. For in¬ 
stance, the pine seed whirls as the wind carries it. 
In this way it can fly a long distance before it settles 
down to earth. Perhaps this is the reason for iso¬ 
lated great pine trees we see in the middle of a 
pasture. 

The days were filled with riotous light. The 
meadows wore their dress of resurrection. Wild 
flowers were unfolding everywhere. Wild birds 
were singing, nesting, mating. It was a world of 
spring, of youth, and of vigor. Into all this living, 
pulsing beauty came the flowering of the fruit trees, 
the end, the apotheosis of spring. With the spray¬ 
ing of the falling blossoms, the stress of seeding 
time was over. One milestone of the farm year 
was passed. 

Many friends came to us. Among them we were 
happy to welcome Marion Crawford, who stopped 
with us on his way to the White Mountains. He 
was a patient, and a dear friend as well. We al¬ 
ways saw him during his short annual visits in New 
York. Most of the year he lived with his family 
in Italy, at Sorrento on the heights above the Bay of 
Naples, where he had a charming home. In manner 
and speech he was a typical Englishman. I showed 
him over the Stone House. He liked it immensely. 
“Beautiful, restful, a home,” he said. “Did you 
have any trouble getting your plumbing and water 
system installed?” he inquired. “Fancy! When I 


150 


WINGED SEEDS 


built my home in Sorrento, I wanted American 
plumbing. I had all materials, bath tubs and so on, 
sent over. No one in all the country round about 
had ever seen anything like the nickel and por¬ 
celain and pipes, not to speak of couplings and 
unions, and more bewildering parts. I puzzled the 
bally thing out, and for the nonce became a journey¬ 
man plumber.” With totally unskilled assistance 
he had done the entire thing himself. It was rather 
wonderful, looking at his immaculate dress, his 
beautiful, slender, expressive hands, thinking of his 
lifework. 

Mr. Crawford told us how he came to write “Mr. 
Isaacs,” his favorite novel. He told us of his Ori¬ 
ental experiences. I heard for the first time that he 
was born in Italy, although his father, Thomas 
Crawford, the sculptor, was an American. Dear 
Mr. Crawford! It is long since he was laid to rest. 

There came also Cissie Loftus. I had met her 
once or twice years before, while we were both ill 
at a hospital, when Finley Peter Dunne, “Mr. 
Dooley,” brought her mechanical toys, and wound 
them up, thereby creating unusual commotion in the 
quiet corridors. Later she came to see the wife of 
the “wonderful black magic man, who had saved 
her life.” She was demure, with a soft English 
voice; strangely shy, and yet more strange, she was 
a bit awkward. It was almost incredible, when one 
remembered her on the stage, where she was the 
very personification of lithe grace. She told us how 


FARM HAPPENINGS 


i51 

the Doctor commanded her to send away her hosts 
of visitors, to put out her lights early and to go to 
sleep. Unconsciously she imitated his voice, his 
manner, his lighting a cigarette so absolutely, that 
it was uncanny. Poor Cecilia! She was more 
sinned against than sinning. She was born on the 
stage, almost, thrown here and there, with no back¬ 
ground of any sort for anchor. She was charming, 
appealing, intensely feminine. How could she help 
her fate? 

There came Walter Damrosch, with his wife, 
Margaret Blaine, and his interesting family of 
daughters. They had a quaint old red-brick house 
at Westport, across the lake toward the sunset, 
about ten miles south of us. There came Huger 
Jervey, with his gentle Southern manner and voice, 
who hero-worshiped the Doctor. Likewise, there 
came Frank Hackett, who was beginning to make a 
success of his school for boys at Riverdale. Both 
were young men, full of dreams, enthusiasms and 
ideals. They seemed many years younger than the 
Doctor, although the difference in age was not great. 

There were many more guests coming and going 
at all times. Best of all the Doctor liked the arrival 
of unannounced visitors. We watched a big house¬ 
boat coming into our bay and anchoring in its shel¬ 
tered, deep water. We looked through our field 
glass. “I do believe it’s Arthur Gray,” said the 
Doctor, “with a party of men.” A tender was 
launched, and landed. It put ashore Rev. Arthur 


152 


WINGED SEEDS 


R. Gray, a tall, spare man in tweeds and yachting 
cap. He looked like anything but the head of an 
Episcopal Foreign Missions Board. The Doctor 
and his patient and friend were equally delighted at 
the meeting. I recall particularly Mr. Gray’s sim¬ 
plicity and dignity of demeanor, his quiet humor, 
his kindly thought for us all. 

“You won’t mind having Mr. Gray’s party for 
meals while they rest up a bit? They need a change 
of diet. Canned foods become tiresome.” Natu¬ 
rally, I was glad to welcome the Doctor’s guests. I 
inquired how many were in the party. “Six or eight 
or more. Who cares?” “They will,” I answered, 
“if there is food for six and eight appear for 
dinner.” 

To be candid, the Doctor did not like anyone to 
stay with us very long. “Hosts and guests should 
never see too much of each other at any one time,” 
he said. When visits seemed to him to drag, he 
disappeared into his study, wrapped himself in 
clouds of smoke and Greek and silence, and left his 
guest or guests to me. Man or woman, or both, it 
mattered little to him. When I called him to task 
for his unconventionality, he said: “Go ahead. 
You hate to have too good a time. You love to 
sacrifice yourself.” 

The beautiful, busy days came and went like our 
family and our friends. Late in June the colts 
arrived, two little stallions and one filly. They were 
darling, leggy things, stumbling all over themselves. 


FARM HAPPENINGS 


153 


All in all, the arrival of the baby colts was the most 
exciting thing that had yet happened in our farm 
life. We had by this become quite used to baby 
calves. All three mothers and babies were con¬ 
tentedly grazing within an hour or thereabout, after 
parturition. Lady and Whiteface were born moth¬ 
ers and stood patiently still, while their babies, on 
wobbly legs, were nuzzling to find their breasts. 
Sister was nervous and had to be forced to let her 
colt drink. She fought the other two mares and 
their colts, and finally had to be put into a box stall 
in the barn. In thrashing about, she hurt her little 
filly, and it developed peritonitis. The Doctor car¬ 
ried it in his arms to the Stone House, and cared for 
it as though it were a human child. It died, poor 
little baby; and then Sister was restless and un¬ 
happy. Her milk was taken from her, yet she 
seemed discontented. Even Scotty felt badly about 
the filly’s death. He snuffed all over the poor, 
shiny, little body, wagged his tail and looked sadly 
at the Doctor. Or so he interpreted his dog’s 
actions. 

The loss of Sister’s colt was our first farm trag¬ 
edy. We did not count such troubles as gasolene 
engines that would go wrong at most inopportune 
times; hired men, who insisted on getting drunk; 
castings that gave out when the tool in question was 
most needed; and all the rest of the dozens of irri¬ 
tating small and big happenings of farm life, things 
that are bound to come in any enterprise. The 


154 


WINGED SEEDS 


Doctor rarely lost his temper. I recall one vivid 
instance. One of the men poured paint oil into the 
workshop engine instead of lubricating oil. Then 
he spent appreciable time in wondering why the 
“damned thing” would not work, and run the pump 
in the artesian well. A long day’s hard work was 
needed to bring pump and engine back into working 
order. Carelessness so stupid would have tried a 
saint’s patience. 

We experimented with Indian Runner ducks, with 
Bronze turkeys, and Embden geese. Eventually 
most of the duck were shot, for wild ones. The 
baby turkeys would insist on getting wet in rain and 
dew and dying. The geese, splendid white un¬ 
gainly things, preferred the flat rocks and our 
bathing beach to any other, for their night quarters. 
They invited the neighbors’ geese to share their 
chosen place. Geese are the messiest birds 
imaginable. 

We had Belgian hares. The only interesting fact 
I could discover about them was again the mother 
and her babies. Before their arrival, she used part 
of the fresh grass or hay fed to her to close up the 
entrance to her hutch. So tightly was it wedged in 
that one had to lift up the entire hutch to see her 
nest. Yet she managed to enter in the regular way. 
She lined her nest against the coming of her babies 
with soft, downy hair torn from her own breast. 
It was quite bare. When at last her baby rabbits 
came, she fought the father until they were sepa- 


FARM HAPPENINGS 


155 


rated. Then she seemed perfectly content, and de¬ 
voted herself to her tiny offspring. Until the little 
rabbits were well able to care for themselves, she 
kept the entrance to her home tightly shut, chang¬ 
ing the grass as she thought it necessary. 

The long bright days went on peacefully, excit¬ 
edly, joyously, anxiously, as the case might be. We 
had a few marvelous red raspberries with a dry, 
rich, delicate flavor like old wine, and with an old 
wine’s beauty of color. We had splendid vegetables 
of many kinds. The drive grew in usefulness and in 
beauty. The house mellowed and sank more and 
more into the green and gray of the landscape, as 
the year wore on to its golden, mellow fulfillment. 
The rich, deep, succulent green of all things was 
slowly misting into pale, soft green, into bright 
yellow, into dim red. Over night came the first 
hoar frost. In the morning there were splashes of 
gorgeous crimson on trees and on vines. Another 
milestone passed. Harvest time. 

We had been almost five months on the farm. 
Much was still to be done. We were content, with 
the content of work achieved, healthful, interesting, 
worthwhile work. Yet we had found time to play. 
“Why, it is all play,” said the Doctor. “I am 
coming to the conclusion that this farming game is 
a great gamble, more so than a poker game. That’s 
what makes it so intensely fascinating, aside from 
the beauty. The uncertainty, the everlasting adven¬ 
ture is the joy of it.” 


CHAPTER FOURTEEN 


LAME DUCKS, ORCHARD GRASS AND RACES 

M ADISON Square Garden and the “Old Glory 
Sale” at Thanksgiving time had a strange 
fascination for the Doctor. Long before the date 
set for the sale, he pored over the catalogue with its 
cryptic pedigrees and marked the brood mares and 
the trotters he wanted most to buy. Fortunately his 
patients held him down to earth. There was no 
knowing what he might not have done otherwise. 
In the end, he came into possession of a really beau¬ 
tiful bay mare, trotting stock, young, very fast, a 
splendid individual, without a blemish. Her name 
was Madge Wildfire. Also he bought a brood mare 
coming three, Young Sweet Marie. She was out of 
two of the fastest trotters of the time, Sweet Marie 
and Bingen. She had been hurt in her first trial 
race, and therefore could be used only as a brood¬ 
mare. She was in foal to Justice Brooke, another 
sire famed for speed. Young Sweet Marie’s colt 
would be eligible for entry into the Kentucky 
Futurity, which fact was cause for great pride and 
rejoicing. We slept, ate, and drank trotters, race 
tracks, Hambletonians and thoroughbreds, Mor¬ 
gans and Arabians, Belgian draft stallions as 

156 


LAME DUCKS 


i57 


against Percheron bred, ad infinitum, until it seemed 
as if the house should have been filled with sawdust 
and tan bark, with men wearing loud-checked 
clothes with red and green ties and diamond horse¬ 
shoe pins. 

The first week of March the Doctor went up to 
the farm to look after his precious horses, and to 
attend March Meeting, that all-important function 
of village and country life. March Meeting with 
its generous, free-for-all discussions is the first sign 
of winter’s break-up. The Town Hall is reached 
by ploughing through miles of indescribably sticky 
mud, or through deep, melting drifts of snow, hard- 
packed on top. To come all the way from New 
York to be present at Town Meeting gave the final 
touch of allegiance to the Township of Ferrisburgh. 

He returned with much of interest to tell me 
about the Meeting with its informal yet heated dis¬ 
cussions anent all things from road improvement to 
Presidential election; how the colts had grown; 
about his latest purchase, a pure-bred, a most mar¬ 
velous individual, a Holstein-Friesian bull calf, the 
future sire for an accredited herd of the breed. I 
looked my surprised wonder. But more of this 
anon. He told how deep the mud was where the 
frost was beginning to leave the ground; how glori¬ 
ous was the color in the marsh; how he intended to 
help improve the Slang Bridge, which was now im¬ 
passable; how well our ice houses had been filled; 
how stupidly our men had interpreted his order for 


WINGED SEEDS 


158 

exercising Young Sweet Marie and Madge Wildfire. 
Despite their slender racing build, they had been 
used to draw fertilizer from the station at Ferris* 
burgh to the farm “through the worst roads at the 
worst time of the whole year.” Sparks flew, even 
in the telling. I could well imagine that there was 
more than just sparks when the Doctor had made 
his discovery. “Like using a piano for kindling,” 
he said. I was surprised the poor, dainty things of 
race would submit to such indignity, and said as 
much. “Submit! They would do anything they 
were asked, until they dropped in their traces. 
That is breeding, in man or beast.” Now he had 
left stringent written orders to drive them both for 
a given time on the light road cart for exercise, to 
rub them down thoroughly, use a liniment he had 
prescribed, and to bandage their legs. “By the time 
we arrive in May, they ought to have recovered 
from the results of colossal stupidity. Yet I sup¬ 
pose one cannot and ought not to expect even aver¬ 
age intelligence from men in subordinate positions 
like theirs. If they had brains, they would soon 
take our jobs from us.” 

He went on to tell me that he had caused great 
excitement by talking race track and races at the 
Centre for the coming season. He was surprised 
to find on what fertile ground these seeds of pro¬ 
gress had fallen. “There was not even one dissent¬ 
ing voice. They grew enthusiastic, Vermonters 
though they were, at the thought of horse races, 


LAME DUCKS 


i59 


County Fair, and more Community enterprise along 
similar lines, all to take place in our own Town¬ 
ship. We’ll set this town to humming one of these 
days, you’ll see. I have been thinking of something 
I want very much to do this year, unless you object 
seriously.” I could guess, and I could not object. 

Always, from the earliest beginnings of his pro¬ 
fessional work, the Doctor was vitally interested in 
the man or woman whom life or circumstances had 
crushed, “Lame Ducks,” so called. They are le¬ 
gion, yet they must be found, for they are shy and 
unsociable generally. Newspapermen who have lost 
important positions through drink, and hang on to 
the outskirts of their former beloved work; artists, 
dreamers, who lack the strength of spirit that brings 
success; professional men and women of all degrees 
who are wanting in stick-to-ativeness to break away 
from drugs; and so on through all the gamut of 
derelicts who need help to steady the ladder, in 
order to negotiate with safety the hard, first rung. 
The Doctor had always meant some day to do more 
than to give advice, to help, actually and spiritually. 

Our farm was the place where they might find 
clean work with their hands, in God’s healing pure 
air and sun. The farm had a background of real 
things, hills, trees, birds, animals, flowers, with ac¬ 
cess to books, and affectionate human contact. 
There was interesting, helpful work on the farm for 
them all. In the end, perhaps, they might find cure. 
From that spring on, each summer saw two or three 


i6o WINGED SEEDS 

unfortunates installed at Big Oak Farm. No one 
but the Doctor and I knew their real circumstances. 
They had come to work on the farm for the im¬ 
provement of their health. Ostensibly they worked, 
more or less helpfully, as circumstances and person¬ 
ality permitted. Fair wages were paid them. The 
Doctor and I were their friends, they were invited 
to the Stone House and received as friends by our¬ 
selves and by our guests. Our hired men treated 
them as superiors who were “queer,” and pitied and 
aided them. In most cases it worked out satisfac¬ 
torily. Only one resulted in dire disaster. There 
were a few miraculous cures. To them all life on 
the farm brought sane personal contact, much hap¬ 
piness and peace, and greatly improved health. 
They added knots and twists to our various prob¬ 
lems, but we were content. We were working with 
the realest thing of all, we were working with life. 
No child had come to us. Our lame ducks were 
after all frightened children groping in the dark. 
They gave to our farm a human and a humanizing 
touch. 

In the long, green and gold days of June we had 
picnics, which everyone was asked to join, down to 
the last helper. Usually part of the day was de¬ 
voted to some utilitarian purpose. We picked de¬ 
licious fieldberries for preserving. We pulled nox¬ 
ious weeds. We cleared the woods of brush, fallen 
branches, and tangled briers, carrying these glean¬ 
ings to flat rocks on the lake shore for the evening’s 


LAME DUCKS 


161 


bonfire. The afternoon was given over to swim¬ 
ming matches, peanut races, boat and tub races and 
other larks. Of course, there was a gypsy fire with 
an iron kettle hung from forked green sticks. 
There was grilling of meat and freshly-caught fish 
on spits made of hardhack rods. There were pota¬ 
toes, presumably baked, but usually charred in the 
ashes. Party of parties, there was a large freezer 
of ice cream. 

After separating for chores on the part of the 
helpers and freshening-up on all our part, we lit our 
bonfire. We toasted marshmallows. Why anyone 
should like the messy things, I cannot imagine. 
The Doctor made every last person who could be 
persuaded so to do, tell an anecdote, a story, or sing 
a song. There were some extraordinary contribu¬ 
tions on these occasions. Invariably we accepted 
them with the laugh or the gravity they were sup¬ 
posed to demand, regardless of what they actually 
evoked. Late in the evening we sent lighted bal¬ 
loons into the night. As they floated serenely out 
of sight beyond the distant woods, we sang the 
“Star Spangled Banner,” “Dixie,” “Way down the 
Suwanee River,” “My Bonny lies over the Ocean,” 
and more good old songs like them. At last we 
poured water over the glimmering, red-hot embers, 
and returned to our sleeping house. In its night- 
dark setting, it looked storied, ghost-like in the 
silence. Never did the farm work go better than 
on the days following these outings. They served 


162 WINGED SEEDS 

to clean the air of grouches and misunderstand¬ 
ings. 

Summer was at our door. Tiny apples clustered 
on the apple trees. Pale-red currants gleamed 
among the bright green bunches. Bees hummed in 
the odorous fields of timothy and clover, Hurd’s 
grass and clover, the old farmers called it. The 
orchard grass was in blow. Peas were climbing the 
brush provided them for the purpose. In my hardy 
garden, gorgeous red poppies were in bloom; pale 
gold and purple iris stood up proudly among their 
tall spikes of green; tiny blue forget-me-nots hung 
their shy heads in the shady bed; the rambler rose 
on the trellis, that bordered my garden, was in bud; 
weeds were everywhere despite hard and continuous 
work with hoe and cultivator. We dug and we 
pulled and we cut. They grew lustily on. Such is 
the tenacity of weeds, or the fertility of nature. 

Haying time was upon us before we were aware. 
Clean, sweet-smelling work that must be done by 
all hands working together. There is a communal, 
a social quality about haying. It must be this, I 
think, makes it beloved of our helpers. At Big Oak 
Farm the apple orchards complicated matters some¬ 
what. The young orchards made it necessary for a 
man to walk behind the mowing machine, so that the 
long cutter bar with its razor-sharp triangular 
knives, should not inadvertently cut down little 
trees. In spite of all care, this unfortunate thing 
happened, though rarely. It is not so much the 


LAME DUCKS 


163 

loss of the young tree or the cost of its replacement. 
It is the value of the time lost that cannot be made 
up. The grass near and in the long rows between 
the trees had to be mowed with a scythe as were the 
fence corners. I enjoyed seeing Jim and Ben use 
the scythe in the good, old-fashioned way. I loved 
the rhythmic swing of the motion, the sharpening 
of the blade on a whetstone, that gives time to look 
at the dazzling sky, to smell the sweetness of things. 

The orchard grass was as sweet, and taller than 
the young trees around which it grew. “We’ll git 
a cut o’ rowan offen this,” the men said, rowan 
meaning the second crop of hay off the same piece 
of meadow land. “Th’ Doc’, he knows whut he’s 
abaout. Thet’s why he cuts this here grass th’ 
middle o’ June.” The true reason is that orchard 
grass makes excellent forage if it is cut early, when 
it contains a large percentage of protein. After the 
middle of June it toughens quickly, thereby losing 
much of its nutritive quality. Besides, in this con¬ 
dition it is not relished by either horses or cattle, 
which makes for waste. Naturally all stock does 
better on food it likes. It has always seemed in¬ 
teresting to me that the forage grasses are jointed 
instead of growing in a continuous stalk. The 
joints give them added strength to withstand wind 
and rain. 

Clouds were gathering over the Adlrondacks. 
This presaged possible rain. All hands were put to 
tumbling. Even I helped for a few minutes to see 


WINGED SEEDS 


164 

what the operation was like. Tumbling hay means 
heaping the sun-dried grass into hillocks so that rain 
will not wet through. However, the night brought 
north wind and sparkling stars. Morning broke 
clear and bright. As soon as the dew burned off 
and was distilled by the hot sun’s rays, loading be¬ 
gan. A man on each side of the big hay wagon 
pitches great forkfuls on to the rack. A third man 
drives the team and loads the hay. The whole 
thing is picturesque. The blazing sun, the soft 
breeze in the waving elms and cedars, the singing 
birds, the sweet smell of the drying hay, the work¬ 
ing together in unity, the feel of plenty. All these 
things make the picture. It looks like very simple, 
unskilled work. Yet dexterity is needful, and ex¬ 
perience, to pitch and to load so that the great mass 
of loose hay is neither one-sided nor top-heavy. It 
is quite remarkable how rarely a load turns over and 
is spilled. The men are much ashamed when this 
does happen. The splendid load of hay is driven 
into the big, cool barn. It seems dark, gratefully 
fresh after the glare outside. More often than not, 
a big stone crock filled with iced coffee or fruit juice 
has been sent over from the Stone House for the 
men. They are very grateful for it. Haying is 
thirsty work. 

Now the hay wagon with its odorous load is in 
the driveway of the barn. It is stopped right under 
the hay fork, which looks like a great harpoon. 
The fork has grappling arms, like the tentacles of a 


LAME DUCKS 


165 

devil fish. Many yards of three-quarter inch rope 
runs through pulleys along the rafters, way up to the 
ridge pole. A horse is hitched to a whiffle-tree, 
which is connected up with the hayfork rope. The 
fork is pressed down deep into the hay, by a man 
standing on the loaded wagon, and grapples a huge 
load in its iron arms. At the given word, the heavy 
draft mare walks off raising the fork with its load. 
Up it goes with its sweet-smelling burden, up, up to 
the very peak of the barn. A yell from the men in 
the mow and the well-trained mare turns about. 
The trip rope is jerked, the fork arms unclasp, and 
the hay drops scattering into the mow. In three or 
four forkfuls the great hayrack is emptied and re¬ 
turns into the dazzle and blaze of the field, ceding 
its cool, dark place in the barn to the second team 
with its equally big load. The work goes on until 
chore time, giving men and teams constant change 
of action. There are times, naturally, when the 
trip rope parts, or the hayfork arms refuse their 
service. The youngest, most agile worker, one who 
is not afraid of height, goes up to splice the rope or 
to readjust the fork. It looks for all the world like 
a circus stunt. I do not like it. By the time the or¬ 
chard grass is under cover, July has come. There 
is a short interim, if all goes well, and haying is not 
hindered by rain. Timothy and clover will not be 
cut until after the Fourth. This is a time-honored 
custom. 

The first races at the Centre were scheduled for 


166 


WINGED SEEDS 


Independence Day. It was a tremendously exciting 
event. The track had been carefully gone over, 
scraped, and sanded. A grand-stand had been built. 
The Doctor was President of the Ferrisburgh Driv¬ 
ing Association, which had become a member of the 
National Trotting Association, with by-laws and all 
the rest of the formal and formidable sounding 
rules and regulations. The races had been widely 
advertised. A brass band had been engaged to 
come all the way from Burlington. The Epworth 
League was to sell ice cream and lemonade and 
other refreshments fitting the occasion. Horses 
had been entered from points many miles distant, 
all the way from Rutland and Manchester in our 
own state, to Essex and Plattsburgh in “York State” 
across the lake. Our friends and patients, the 
David Crawford Clarks, who had a beautiful es¬ 
tate and farm at Essex at the foot of the Adiron- 
dacks on the shore, were coming over in their yacht 
to view the races and to dine with us. Altogether 
it was to be a memorable event. The Doctor would 
show Madge Wildfire, but owing to the mistaken 
exercise of the winter, he would not let her race. 

The eventful day arrived, hot, clear, tempered 
with our favorite wind from the north, the wind 
that bears on its wings all the sweet, pure glory of 
our forests and our mountains. The race-track 
meadow at the Centre was a kaleidoscope of gay 
life and color. I had never imagined the possibility 
of such a crowd within the confines of our quiet vil- 


LAME DUCKS 


167 

lage. Hundreds of buggies and horses were hitched 
to fences everywhere. Ford cars were parked in 
all directions. Sleek horses were led up and down 
the track to get them limbered up for the race. 
Racing carts, decorated with many colors, stood 
ready. The marshal, his mount decked gaily, rode 
grandly up and down the field. Refreshment tents 
glistened white, were hung with flags and greens, 
and everywhere were holiday faces, expectant, smil¬ 
ing. The prizes were on view, brand new, brightly- 
colored horse blankets. A baseball game was in 
progress at one end of the field. Trumpet blasts 
announced the beginning of the ceremonies. 

The school children were grouped around a flag 
pole at the starter’s stand. The Doctor had do¬ 
nated both cedar pole and a splendid, big flag. It 
was raised to the accompaniment of “My Country, 
’Tis of Thee,” played by the band and sung by the 
children. Raising our country’s emblem is always 
an affecting ceremony, and we were glad when the 
flag floated and the band broke into a stirring Sousa 
March. 

There were some really exciting trots, won by 
hair-breadth lengths. There was a free-for-all race. 
Long before the thing was over I was tired of star¬ 
ing into the sun. Not for all the world would I 
have permitted myself to show any abatement of 
interest. Such are the grave duties of social life. 
It was amusing to watch the Doctor, and to see how 
intensely he enjoyed the sensation his beloved 


168 


WINGED SEEDS 


Madge Wildfire created. She was groomed to the 
«th degree. I truly believe she had been rubbed 
with ointment to make her coat glisten like dull 
gold-brown satin. 

At last the blanket prizes had been awarded the 
winners. They were now engaged in sponging off 
and otherwise caring for their horses. People had 
begun to scatter. It was long after chores should 
have been done. Every last glass of lemonade, 
every ice cream cone had been sold. The demand 
had been much greater than the supply. Quite a 
sum of money was in the treasurer’s hands for use 
in furthering the affairs of the Driving Association. 
The celebration was voted a rousing success in every 
way, the best July Fourth the township had seen for 
many years. 

We drove back to the lake behind Lady and Sis¬ 
ter, who wore flag rosettes on their tossing heads. 
The Doctor had Mr. Clark with him and drove 
Madge himself. She certainly was the most spirited 
and high-bred looking thing in sight. As we turned 
toward the bridge by the falls, I looked back. The 
field was deserted, the track empty. High above it 
our flag streamed out into the dusty-gold sunset 
light. Evening clouds hung over the distant hills, 
barred with gold and red like the stripes of the flag, 
its pure white stars in their field of blue like emblems 
of age-old stars glittering in God’s blue vault of 
heaven. 


CHAPTER FIFTEEN 


“many inventions’’ 

W E were driving along the highway near the 
Centre. Coming up the steep path from the 
creek, we saw a boy leading a little black horse. 
The Doctor looked up sharply. He asked me to 
hold Madge for a moment, which I did obediently 
rather than joyfully. I watched Madge out of one 
eye and the Doctor out of the other. He spent 
some long minutes examining the thin, tired-looking 
horse. Then he returned to Madge and to me. “I 
shouldn’t wonder if I have found the very thing for 
you to drive and to ride.’’ “That starved little 
beast?” “That starved little beast is a pure-bred 
Morgan gelding coming four. He needs less work, 
sufficient food, and good care. He’ll be the pretti¬ 
est thing you ever want to own. You could not 
guess his name. The boy said they wavered be¬ 
tween calling him Toothpick or Sliver when he came 
to them, he was such a tiny colt.” We rarely 
changed the name of any of our purchases, if it was 
not altogether impossible. Sliver became a much¬ 
loved member of our farm family. 

For many years he was my especial pet and 

driver, receiving all the tid-bits and the lightest 

169 


170 


WINGED SEEDS 


work in the barn. He had spirit and endurance, 
was gentle and fast, and grew to be beautiful in¬ 
deed, just as the Doctor had prophesied. After 
middle age, unfortunately, he developed a spavin. 
He was fired by a veterinary. Firing means burn¬ 
ing the affected bone of the leg with a heated iron. 
Much to the veterinary’s surprise, the Doctor in¬ 
sisted on giving poor Sliver a hypodermic to lessen 
the agony of the operation. He had a year’s vaca¬ 
tion in pasture and in box stall, but he never recov¬ 
ered entirely. To the end of his life he was beau¬ 
tiful. He was the pet of the barn, doing very little 
at any time and spending the summers happily in 
pasture. The school children, on their way to and 
from the Porterborough School near us, saved 
apples and sweets from their lunches to feed him 
when he was in the paddock. All the countryside 
knew Sliver. Like Scotty, he belonged. Both were 
night-black and shone from much grooming. Both 
were clever and devoted to but two people in all 
their world, the Doctor and me. Like Scotty, 
many years later, Sliver was mercifully shot and 
buried with all his belongings. When I say merci¬ 
fully shot, I mean shot, so that he died instantly, 
without knowing what had befallen. Both Sliver 
and Scotty were deeply mourned. They had been 
beloved friends and comrades. 

Cared-for animals have one great advantage over 
their human friends. One does not permit them to 
suffer unduly. One puts them out of their pain. 


“MANY INVENTIONS” 


171 

We who are human and are sure of our souls must 
live and eat out our anguish to the bitter end. 
More than once the Doctor said to me: “Every 
profession has its tragic side. The tragedy of the 
physician is his duty to prolong life when death 
would be a blessed relief.” 

Grading had begun. Four teams were drawing 
earth. North and south of the Stone House the 
work went busily on. This work, the Doctor ex¬ 
plained to me, was the starting point for the lawns. 
I did so love the evergreens, with their carpet of 
forest floor all about our house, made of odorous 
pine needles, cedar branchlets and the accumulation 
of hundreds of years of rich leaf mold. It was so 
brown and sweet and springy. To tell the truth, 
I hate change, or rather, I fear it. One can never 
be sure of the outcome. The Doctor, on the con¬ 
trary, liked nothing better. “If one could always 
foresee each happening’s positive result, life would 
lose half its interest, and most of its joy.” The 
grading was fairly messy. Given the right sort of 
wind, dust flies in clouds, another drawback. How¬ 
ever that may have been, the teams went on like the 
perennial brook. 

Meanwhile our flower and vegetable gardens 
grew and flourished. Our strawberry patch was a 
tyrant, so were the raspberries and the currants; 
in fact, all the gardens tyrannized over us. Not 
only did we share with our neighbors, but also we 
preserved, and we jammed, and we jellied; we 


172 


WINGED SEEDS 


blanched and we dried and we canned; hundreds of 
glasses and jars until I felt as if I never wanted to 
see another rubber ring, or another drop of melted 
paraffine for the rest of my life. With the coming 
of a new summer, one remembers the winter’s deli¬ 
cious vegetables and condiments and sweets and how 
home-grown and home-made preserves are appre¬ 
ciated by family and friends in the city, and has for¬ 
gotten the hot sun, and the hotter kitchen with its 
cloying smells. The Doctor bought and taught us 
to use sugar thermometer, sterilizer, and evapo¬ 
rator. Both Mary and I were conservative and in 
our heart of hearts disliked giving up accustomed, 
old-fashioned ways; for instance, trying fruit juice 
on a plate, on ice, to see whether it is sufficiently 
jellied, and similar guesswork methods. We soon 
learned that exact, scientific ways, once they are un¬ 
derstood, are easier, quicker, and infinitely less 
wasteful. 

At this time I began to appreciate fully the pam¬ 
phlets of our Department of Agriculture, those 
splendid, carefully worked-out and tabulated mono¬ 
graphs to be had from a paternal government for 
the asking. The Doctor had accumulated hundreds 
of them. He had bound and catalogued them pains¬ 
takingly. Truly, it is marvelous how much help 
our Department of Agriculture gives, is happy to 
give in the most efficient, courteous manner possible. 
You have an unnamed apple, or one that is not true 
to name. Send it to the Division of Pomology. 


“MANY INVENTIONS” 


173 


Without undue delay your apple is named and every 
question is fully answered. Your cedars have a 
disease. Send a branch to the Division of Forestry, 
or Plant Pathology. Back comes a letter of expla¬ 
nation, cause, remedies, etc. The unfailing courtesy 
and helpfulness of the Department was so fine that 
one Christmas the Doctor wrote a note of acknowl¬ 
edgment to Mr. Wilson, then Secretary of Agricul¬ 
ture. In return we received a pathetic letter of 
gratitude. “He was deeply touched. In the course 
of his many years of serious endeavor in the De¬ 
partment scores of complaints had reached him. 
This letter of appreciation was the first in his ex¬ 
perience.” 

There are drones in the henhouse, as well as in 
the beehive. One day in early September a poultry 
expert, connected with the Department of Agricul¬ 
ture Extension Service, came to cull our hens: 
Barred Plymouth Rocks, White and Brown Leg¬ 
horns, Columbian Wyandottes, and Bantams. The 
henhouse was whitewashed and had chaff on its 
cement floor. The drones were picked out, and put 
into a separate compartment of the house. By this 
time the expert, the Doctor, and I looked like dusty 
millers, and our throats felt as if we had worked at 
the end of the thresher after a dry summer. The 
result of our culling gave me the surprise of my life. 
Among the culls were splendid hens with bright red 
combs, lustrous feathers, deep yellow feet and bills, 
the very birds I should have selected as particularly 


174 


WINGED SEEDS 


fine specimens. The poultry man picked up a Plym¬ 
outh Rock hen whose feathers looked dingy, whose 
comb was pale, whose legs and feet and bill were a 
sickly yellow. “You see,” he said, “this hen has 
worked and has done her duty. She is tired out, 
her feathers show it. They need renewal by molt¬ 
ing, which is the deserving hen’s time of rest. The 
bright color of her comb and beak and legs has gone 
into the making of egg yolk. She has paid her 
way.” Now we looked at the imprisoned birds. 
“They have laid no eggs, or very few. Do not sell 
these culls for a week or ten days. If you get any 
eggs, you may send them to me unwrapped through 
the mail.” There was not one egg to send. Those 
beautiful drones had been eating their heads off and 
enjoying the sunshine. No wonder they were well- 
groomed and strong and bright. 

“When shall you be ready to preserve your eggs 
in water glass?” asked the Doctor. “We must get 
rid of our roosters before that time.” He ex¬ 
plained that eggs preserved in silicate of lime keep 
better if they are sterile and are put into the solu¬ 
tion daily as they are laid. As an experiment, we 
kept some of the preserved eggs until the following 
spring. We used them for baking, for sauces, and 
general cooking. We were surprised to find that 
the yolk and white separated perfectly, that the 
white could be beaten stiff, and that there was no 
unpleasant taste. The secret of success is, there¬ 
fore; fertile eggs must not be used, fresh, eggs of 


“MANY INVENTIONS” 


175 


the day’s laying must be put into the water glass. 
The eggs must be taken out, a few at a time, as 
used, and not exposed to the air unnecessarily. 

The Doctor had a smoke house built for me, out 
of our lake-shore granite. It had a great nail- 
studded door of oak, and looked like an entrance 
into a cave or secret passage. I told him he had 
built a smoke house with an operatic flavor. It 
might have been Aida’s rock tomb in which she 
sought death with her lover Rhadames. We were 
eager to smoke our own hams and bacon and to 
make home-made sausage. Eventually we made all 
three, trying out the various ways recommended to 
us. It is strange that no two people ever happen 
to tell you one and the same method of doing any¬ 
thing, whether it is feeding hens or hogs, tracing up 
corn, or making a permanent whitewash. We tried 
dry pickle and wet brine. We made fires with corn 
cobs and with shagbark hickory. Like everything 
else, we had to learn by experience. It was splen¬ 
did fun learning. Nothing could equal our pride 
when we sent off home-grown, home-cured, home- 
smoked sides of bacon and joints of ham to our 
family and friends in New York. We were happy 
in the realization, the bewildering, the wonderful 
fact, that by far the greater part of our meals were 
grown on the farm. I am sure it is a wearisome 
thing for guests to hear repeatedly, yet hear it they 
must and do. “This and this and this all grew on 


WINGED SEEDS 


176 

the farm. Our own butter, our own vinegar, our 
own cider, our own whole wheat flour.” 

The green-stained table and chairs of Long 
House days, which we used for the study at first, 
had been replaced by a big, oak library table and 
chairs, designed by the Doctor and made by a joiner 
at Vergennes, Joseph Danyou. Both table and 
chairs had straight, simple lines that mean strength 
and beauty. They typified the life of an oak, whose 
every branch and twig and leaf is beautiful, strong 
and made to serve its single purpose in the being 
of the whole. The many-drawered table was the 
most sacred thing in all the Stone House. It was 
always cluttered with a hundred things. Every 
scrap of paper was precious beyond compare, espe¬ 
cially if lost or mislaid in one of my “straightening 
out and putting in order spells.” Said the Doctor: 
“In my ‘mix-up’ I can find every last thing. In your 
‘perfect order,’ nothing is where it ought to be.” 
Magazines, books, manuscript, breeding records, 
apothecary’s scales, letters by the dozen, frequently 
unopened, pamphlets, paper cutters, writing and 
smoking materials, fishing rods and whips and rid¬ 
ing crops in need of repair, and much more littered 
the big table. The magazines were legion. There 
were many on agricultural subjects. I felt in duty 
bound to read as many of these as I could manage 
to. They ranged from the Breeder’s Gazette to 
the Country Gentleman, from the Holstein-Friesian 
Register to the Poultry Journal. How I hated to 


“MANY INVENTIONS” 


177 


read and to study them when my favorite Geo¬ 
graphic was near. Apart from its interesting illus¬ 
trations and subject matter of distant lands and 
peoples, I found more poetry and poetic allusion 
between the pages of the Geographic than in many 
a periodical devoted to literature and to literary 
endeavor. 

Dusk falls early as September nears its end, and 
the birds begin foregathering. We enjoyed the 
long evenings in the study with its mellow, soothing 
lamp light and its crackling fire that showered 
sparks companionably up the chimney. Best of all 
we loved a rainy night, the shut-in-ness of it, its in¬ 
effable peace. Sometimes I played in the drawing 
room with my driftwood fire burning in all the 
colors of the rainbow. Comments floated down oc¬ 
casionally from the study, on smoke clouds out of 
one of the favorite pipes. I was singing the love 
song from “Samson and Delilah.” “Why be so 
blamed melodramatic?” I tried again. “Good 
Lord, now you’re colder than charity.” Until I in¬ 
sisted on the critic’s accompanying me, when he usu¬ 
ally drifted off into improvising, and I was left in 
peace to read. 

We decided to try some tree planting that 
autumn. A number of young apple trees had died 
from various causes. The Doctor was anxious to 
gain the time instead of waiting until late spring. 
Authorities differ greatly on the subject of fall 
planting in northern Vermont and similar latitudes. 


WINGED SEEDS 


178 

We gave it a fair trial several seasons in succession. 
The result was nil as compared with spring planting. 
For the small number of trees that lived, the time 
was gained. A large percentage of the fall-planted 
trees died despite every possible care and precau¬ 
tion, a percentage far in excess of the spring-planted 
ones. It is different, of course, with setting out of 
perennial flowering plants, bulbs and so on. With 
these the time is actually gained, as in most cases 
they flower the first summer after planting. 

I set out a large number of bulbs in the pine and 
oak grove beyond my hardy garden, tulips, narcis¬ 
sus, daffodils, jonquils, crocus, set them without 
rhyme or reason. Those that lived and thrived 
would appear absolutely natural, as if in their native 
haunts. A great many lived, and are still a joy. 
They come up, seemingly in the most unlikely places, 
the snowdrops and crocus first, before even wild 
hepatica shows its tiny flower. I got my desired re¬ 
sult of naturalness in more ways than one. Each 
spring since I planted my bulbs, some worker digs 
up a flower, roots and all, and brings it to me as 
a wonderful find. I have not the heart to say that 
it is not a wild thing. Again, our first asparagus 
bed was industriously ploughed up one autumn 
with the rest of the garden. The man who did the 
damage was so abjectly sorry about his carelessness 
that the Doctor said very little. 

On the whole, the best of the hired men tried 
hard to please us. They tried to remember to replace 


“MANY INVENTIONS” 


179 


tools in the workshop instead of leaving them where 
they were last used, their common habit. For in¬ 
stance, they were repairing fence. Post hole dig¬ 
ger, fence stretcher and chain, wire, staples, or 
sledge hammer were left over night or longer near 
the pasture fence in the woods, or the line fence on 
the high road. The consequence was that one tool 
or another was forgotten. This meant time wasted 
in search at the next fence-repairing job. The tools 
left in this wise were rarely, if ever, stolen. Only 
since the coming of motors and strangers on our 
roads do we lock our barn doors and our tool houses 
at night. I recall a strange stealing at Big Oak 
Farm one snowy night. Rails and posts of an old 
split rail fence were carried off bodily. “Well,” 
said the Doctor, “it is cold. Someone got good 
and warm at any rate. Besides I had meant to re¬ 
place that worn-out rail fence by new cedar posts 
and woven wire at the first opportunity.” In the 
course of time we lost several row boats which were 
taken by State School runaways to cross the lake 
into New York. Usually they cast the boats adrift 
when they landed. After this experience, we kept 
oars and oar locks at the Stone House instead of 
in the boathouse at the dock. 

Grading for the lawns, which had been going 
steadily on, was finished. I was delighted when 
they told me that the last load was in place. There 
was a big south lawn, and two smaller ones each 
side of the south porch or drive entrance. Here at 


i8o 


WINGED SEEDS 


last, in actual being was the turn-around of Mr. 
Platt’s water color, that mystified me so long ago. 
The north lawn had a terrace at both its east and 
west ends. Of necessity more trees had to be cut. 
Then the two-horse roller came and the dirt was 
rolled and rolled and rolled again. There came a 
long soaking rain. It rained steadily and drippingly 
for two days and nights. Grass seed was broad¬ 
casted all over the prepared spaces. High-grade 
fertilizer followed, and the deed was done. In less 
than two weeks a mist of green began to veil the 
brown earth. When the Doctor showed me the pale 
green of his grass seed that had sprouted wings, I 
ceased regretting my lost forest floor. At last I 
visualized the meaning and the setting velvet-smooth 
lawns would give to the Stone House. “Next comes 
the retaining wall and a balustrade. We’ll look up 
a balustrade this winter.” 

The time had come, alas, for our return to New 
York. Each succeeding year it grew harder to leave 
the farm and all it meant to us. Never was the 
beauty, the joy, the peace of it all so poignant as 
when we took our last long look at the blue hills, 
splashed with bright color, at the lake sparkling in 
the crisp October air. 


CHAPTER SIXTEEN 


THE ROSE GARDEN HOLSTEIN-FRIESIAN CATTLE 
AND CONTROVERSIAL MOTORS 

T hanksgiving day was veiled in sunny 

mist. Even in the walled city streets it was a 
day of grace added to summer. There was a sound 
of hammer and chisel in the office and I wondered 
what the Doctor could be taking apart. He came 
into the library carrying a marble statuette. As 
usual, he was followed by Scotty. “I’ve found our 
balustrade, and I could not resist the lure of this. 
You are please not to ask me what I paid for it. 
It is a Christmas gift for you and your rose garden. 
It seemed such a pity to wait for a whole month to 
show it to you. Now we can enjoy it for just that 
much longer.” “It” was Donatello’s charming little 
“Laughing Boy.” The man of dreams straightway 
got a pedestal and put it under the chandelier in 
the center of the room. “Here’s your rose garden,” 
waving his arm at chairs and books. “Your Dona¬ 
tello baby will always be smiling at the loveliness 
about him. Can’t you smell the roses and the pines 
and cedars? Can’t you hear the lake and the wind 
in the trees? Don’t you wish it were spring? 

Let’s leave him where he is for the present.” “But 

181 


182 


WINGED SEEDS 


this is November, and we are in New York. Don’t 
you think our Donatello baby will be quite as happy 
on the piano or on one of the bookcases?” 

Once again came spring to gladden the heart and 
awaken the spirit of the world. It is a blessed priv¬ 
ilege to live and to die where ever-changing seasons 
bring magic and peace. Spring was slow that year, 
deliberate, filled with cold wind and snow flurries. 
We were glad, for all the joyous adventure of awak¬ 
ening would be ours. 

There was neither sleighing nor wheeling on our 
roads. Soft drifts of gray, tired-looking snow, and 
deep ruts of sticky mud alternated. The drive to 
the lake was long. Yet there was the feel of spring, 
the smell of pregnant earth, despite the raw wind 
and leaden skies. We turned into the drive at last. 
The Stone House loomed through the trees. 
Home! A thousand times more home than the 
house we had left wrapped in muslin and camphor 
smells. We passed the Big Oak. The ancient tree 
held out its gnarled, bare branches protectingly over 
the clearing. There was no sign of swelling leaf 
buds, yet down deep it was awake and seething with 
life. Yes, underneath all this cold spring world 
there was awakening, flaming life. Wagner has 
immortalized this slow resurrection, this bursting 
into passionate flame in his marvelously conceived, 
poetic interpretation of the old Norse legend of 
love and spring in “Die Walkuere”; typified by the 
meeting of Siegmund and Sieglinde, their passion, 


THE ROSE GARDEN 


183 

their heroic son. Pagan, unmoral—perhaps. It is 
kin to all myths of all early peoples, Sanskrit, 
Greek, Norse, and all the rest. Morality in its 
finite sense has little to do with the poetry of nature. 
Early religions were after all little else than imag¬ 
inative interpretations of birth and death, love and 
hate, courage and fear, in their relation to natural 
phenomena. No poet, to my way of thinking, has 
understood more deeply this fundamental difference 
between the psychology of pagan life and religion, 
and the philosophy of medieval life and morals, 
than the musician Wagner. Goethe, had he been a 
minor poet, would have been a great scientist. 
Wagner, had he been a minor musician, would have 
been a great poet. 

“Dreaming?”—The Doctor was speaking. 
“Suppose you wake up and look about you. There’s 
a new clearing.” “Oh, the rose garden!” Not one 
word had he told me. The clearing for my roses 
was freed of trees and stumps. It was ready to be 
ploughed. “I have ordered your rose bushes from 
Charlotte. We’ll plant them together as soon as 
the weather permits preparing the land.” 

Before night it was snowing great flakes. I re¬ 
joiced at the pure, soft whiteness of things. Old 
Ben looked glum. “An’t we hed enough o’ winter 
an’ snow. Wish’d th’ grass’d git t’ growin’ green! 
Ye looked et yer woodbine, ye planted araoun’ th’ 
walls? It’s ketched good.” With my hands I 
cleared away the snow and held a lantern close. 


WINGED SEEDS 


184 

Yes, the buds were swelling on the ampelopsis vines 
the Doctor and I had planted against the founda¬ 
tion walls. We were longing to have their green 
veiling to soften the face of the gray granite. By 
morning the skies were blue as lapis lazuli, the sun 
was shining gold. Instead of the feathery white 
blanket of the night, there were myriad tinkling 
brooklets crawling over bare brown earth to the 
lake. Everywhere there was mud, oozy mud. But 
who thinks twice of mud when the air is filled with 
sweet color, sweet smells, sweet voices, when one 
knows that spring is on the way, has come? 

We spent all that first day looking at our precious 
possessions in the barns. There was much indeed 
to see. Sister and Lady, the draft teams, the two 
splendid yearling colts; the cows, the soft-eyed Jer¬ 
sey calves; the dozens of piggies, chickens, and 
ducklings with their various mother sows, hens, and 
ducks; and the kittens of all colors and ages. No 
one on the place knew exactly how many cat mothers 
and babies there were. During milking time those 
cats and kittens sat in a solemn family circle wait¬ 
ing for their skim milk. They certainly seemed 
needlessly many, yet they kept barns and granary 
free of rats and mice, those pests of farms and farm 
buildings. The Doctor showed me his Holstein- 
Friesian yearling bull and two yearling heifer calves 
he had added to our farm family. All three were of 
different families, but with equally long names and 
pedigrees. These were the nucleus of our future 


THE ROSE GARDEN 


185 

herd, he explained. “They are all three registered. 
See the white tips of their tails. That is one of the 
necessary distinguishing marks for eligibility.” 
“White tips to their tails, what a ridiculous thing!” 

Holstein-Friesians are big, strong-boned cattle 
with sleek, shiny black and white coats. Every last 
marking and line and spot has to be carefully noted 
when applying for registry in the Holstein-Friesian 
Association. “They may be very wonderful beasts, 
but they are not half as beautiful as our dove-col¬ 
ored, dainty Jerseys.” The Doctor went on to ex¬ 
plain that he had decided on Holsteins for the large 
quantity of milk they give, although it contains a 
smaller percentage of butter fat per pound of fluid. 
“As family cows the Jerseys and Guernseys with 
their rich milk, comparatively small in quantity, are 
a good investment. From the commercial point of 
view, and with the idea of selling whole milk, the 
Holsteins are a far better one. Given the right 
sort of care and good pasture with plenty of pure 
water together with balanced ration feeding, the 
best type of individual will give three milkings per 
day.” 

“You wait and see what we’ll accomplish when 
we get a stock farm. We’ll build silos and put a 
large acreage into fodder corn and millet. We’ll 
grow alfalfa and soudan grass, cow peas and soy 
beans. We’ll grow and mix our own balanced ra¬ 
tions. What fun it will be trying out all the various 
methods of feeding and of food. Some day we’ll 


18 6 


WINGED SEEDS 


have beef cattle too: Shorthorns and big white-faced 
Herefords.” It made my head swim to think about 
all these things. For the Doctor these plans and 
problems were adventures; they were sweeter than 
meat and bread, than sleep and wine. 

On Memorial Day came a gift in the shape of an 
Old English Sheep dog, a beautiful gray and white 
thing, in color much resembling the Stone House. 
Jim took her out of her crate. “Gosh! Ef I’d a 
met thet in th’ woods of a black night, I’d a wish’d 
fer my gun t’ shoot fust an’ look after.” She was 
the gentlest creature, and soon shared Scotty’s ad¬ 
ventures and some of our love. I called her Drive, 
a name more fitting for a male hound than for a 
female show dog. We wanted local color; Drive 
was the name of a favorite dog in one of Rowland 
Robinson’s stories, so Drive it had to be. It was 
amusing to watch Scotty and Drive together. The 
male dog knew his place and gave way in all things 
to Drive, the lady. He did it with fairly bad grace, 
like an only child into whose life a baby sister has 
come. Drive knew a good thing when she had it, 
and invariably got the juiciest bone, while Scotty 
looked dejectedly on. Scotty outlived Drive by 
many years, although he was her senior. So, after 
all, he got the better of the female dog. 

There came American Beauty, the Doctor’s own 
saddle mare, whom no one but he could control. 
When a colt, she had thrown and killed a groom, 
and ever after she had been difficult to handle. The 


THE ROSE GARDEN 


187 


Doctor won her love, and to him she showed none 
of her bad manners and malignant fire. Our men 
were afraid of her and handled her with kid gloves, 
as it were. She was a dark bay, beautifully built 
and splendidly gaited. After the Doctor gentled 
her, he would ride no other horse. He never spoke 
of “breaking a colt,” it was “gentling”, or ought to 
be, he said. 

One morning, before six, I was awakened out of 
dreamless sleep. “Guess what! Sweet Marie has 
a stallion colt. Get dressed, sleepy head, and'come 
over to the horse barn. I have already named him 
Justice Bingen.” “What about breakfast?” “Oh, 
breakfast, when we’ve got a stallion colt eligible for 
entry in the Kentucky Futurity!” I got as far as 
the entrance door. There, under the trees in the 
oak clearing was Sweet Marie and her wonderful 
baby, that had arrived at dawn. The Doctor had 
brought her over so that mare and suckling would 
not be out of his sight for the first few days. He 
made a happy third in the picture. The colt was a 
beautifully-formed, strong little thing. “See its 
head, see its arched neck!” He was just bubbling 
over with joy and pride, as if it were all his doing. 
“I’ve been trying to think what to do to celebrate.” 
“Suppose we have breakfast, while you do the rest 
of your thinking. I am hungry.” “What a work-a- 
day person you are. Very well, let us eat.” 

Our rose plants had begun to sprout tiny wings. 
Long before this, the rose garden had been 


18 8 


WINGED SEEDS 


ploughed, harrowed and smoothed. One quiet gray 
day, the Doctor and I had planted our roses: old 
timey, deep red Jacks, properly named General 
Jacqueminots, pink and white moss roses, hardy tea 
roses that have the color of dawn in spring, native 
single deep • pink eglantines, and native yellows, 
Suns of Gold, and Persians. We enjoyed digging 
the holes, and mixing coarse sand and bone meal 
with the clay soil. Best of all, was setting the little 
dormant bushes, each with its name carefully ap¬ 
pended. The birds and the wind, the trees and the 
water were all saying prayers as we worked. 

The new launch had come. She had a small cabin 
and was everything in looks that could be wished. 
There was only one trouble: she would not go. Be¬ 
ginning with the Doctor, every man who was fam¬ 
iliar with gasolene engines tried his hand. Once 
in so often, she actually went and was very fast, but 
mostly we contemplated our picturesque shores 
somewhere from the middle of the lake. We were 
expected at the Clarks’ for luncheon. They rescued 
us and towed us into Essex Bay with many unkind 
thrusts at our mechanical genius in particular, and 
motor boats that were stationary, in general. “She 
was too big. She was too small. She was too heavy 
for her engine. She was too light.” She certainly 
was cause for the use of much blue language. Ex¬ 
perts from Vergennes and from Burlington tried 
their skill. She was all things to all men, and I 
never felt sure of her, until a different type of 



Larkspurs and Moonflowers, 






THE ROSE GARDEN 189 

marine engine was installed. She was like a selfish 
wife. One just had to admit oneself cornered or 
fight without end. The Doctor hated to acknowl¬ 
edge himself beaten. The only time we crossed the 
lake without mishap was the day we went to call on 
the Hamilton Wright Mabies. As gentle, old Mr. 
Mabie came to the landing, he greeted us: “I am 
so glad you got here. We have heard about your 
boat, and we watched for you. We feared you 
would not be able to cross—against this big south¬ 
west wind,” he added, with his usual kindliness. 
The Doctor winced, but said nothing. 

In my hardy garden peonies had bloomed. Wine- 
colored hollyhocks and skyey blue larkspur, coppery 
day lilies, and fragrant little green mignonette were 
in bud. Blue Canterbury bells nodded gaily to the 
Sweet Williams, while the stately white iris looked 
reprovingly at them. Many-colored portulaca 
opened their childish faces to the sun and won¬ 
dered why the evening primroses would not talk 
to them. The primroses were asleep. They had 
foregathered late with the new moon and the fire¬ 
flies. Yellow stars of stonecrops crept slowly over 
the brick walk to make friends with the forget-me- 
nots and the pansies, but could not get near enough. 
A garden family is always happy. I think it must 
be because flowers leave each other alone so under- 
standingly. Each one buds, blooms, lives, and dies 
according to his own desire. 

Each day brought its own glory, its own magic, 


190 


WINGED SEEDS 


its own work, its own disappointment. Never was 
there a more wondrous summer. Never was life 
fuller of a thousand absorbing interests. Calves 
were sick, horses got hurt, went lame. Rain made 
planting late. Crows ate the corn. Borers killed 
the apple trees. Cut worms ate the vegetable and 
flower seedlings. Every imaginable thing hap¬ 
pened, good, bad, and indifferent. The tremendous 
thing, the vital thing, that stood out in starry, high 
relief, was the farm, the farm in actual being. We 
were creating. We were doing our share to help 
to feed the world. 

The ampelopsis vines had begun to climb, holding 
fast with their spirally tendrils. They veiled the 
gray face of our house, and gave to the stone walls 
a look of age and of softened beauty. Our lawns 
were green as green. The spindle balustrade was 
finished and stood gracefully erect on its retaining 
wall. With its twin Greek urns at each end, it 
brought a touch of old-time formality, a look of 
classic dignity to house and grounds. The Dona¬ 
tello baby on his pedestal in the center of the rose 
garden, laughed with the baby rose bushes and the 
thrushes and the yellow warblers, at all the loveli¬ 
ness about him. Things had shaped themselves 
marvelously. Life was very full, very beautiful. It 
seemed that time must stand still to give thought to 
all this fullness, to all this beauty. “Don’t plan 
anything, don’t do anything more this year,” I 
begged the Doctor. “Don’t do anything! Don’t 


THE ROSE GARDEN 


191 

plan anything! Why, I have only just begun. 
Want to come and look at some land for the stock 
farm? We’ll ride Beauty and Sliver and make a 
day of it.” An hour later we rode south into a 
glowing September sun. 


CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 


WINTER DAYS OF LEISURE, THE ADVENTURE OF 
POLTRON AND THE SOUTH FARM 

W HEN I went up to the farm in late January, 
the rose garden looked like a giant frosted 
wedding cake, decorated with glistening sugar 
fairies. They were standing up straight, were 
bowing down low, or seemed on their knees in the 
attitude of prayer. The fairies were the young 
rosebushes tied to stakes and dressed in their winter 
covering of burlap, all powdered with snow and 
coated with ice. It was so fantastic in the brilliant 
sunshine that I went out to the garden in the cedars 
at night, a glorious winter night of moon and stars 
and fiery, cold Northern lights. In the silver and 
blue shadows it looked still less like our rose garden. 
The bushes were frost elves in a mystic rite, to which 
the wind in the arbor vitae beat a slow rhythm. All 
other sound was frozen like the waters of the lake. 
Beyond the silvered white stillness was mystery. 
The New York shore was wrapped in black shadow. 
The Adirondack hills were blacker still. There was 
no light on Split Rock. The utter silence and peace 
was broken only by the crackling of frost in the 

tree twigs. I was alone in the shadowy glory of 

192 


WINTER DAYS OF LEISURE 193 

winter and night and silence. Yet I did not feel 
alone. 

The following morning it was cold, windless, and 
blindingly bright. The air was filled with myriads 
of diamond crystals. Glittery particles of what 
seemed powdered snow was frost in the sunny air. 
Everything sparkled and spangled and glistened. 
The evergreens were a forest of Christmas trees, 
hung with sunlight iridescence. I found the ther¬ 
mometer outside the horse barn registered 25 0 be¬ 
low zero. Yet the dry atmosphere did not feel as 
cold as io° above in the damp sea air of New York. 
Jim and Ben were at work with a gasolene torch 
thawing out the water pipes in the barn. It was 
warm indoors compared with the temperature 
outside. 

I do love the barns in winter time; with horses 
and colts, calves and cows contentedly munching 
their hay and grain; with well-filled grain bins, 
with sweet-smelling hay and straw in the mows. 
There is an indescribable, a homely smell one grows 
to like in well-kept country barns. It is a smell 
made up of cared-for, healthy beasts, of white wash, 
leather, hay, grain. It is vital, alive. It stands 
for work and plenty. It means love, duty, home. 

People of the cities have the strange idea that 
all work on farms, except feeding the stock and 
milking, ends with the advent of winter and cold. 
Nothing is farther from the truth. The land is 
covered with snow? The earth is asleep? Nature 


194 


WINGED SEEDS 


is never at a standstill. Nature is never asleep. 
Farms cannot be closed up because the weather is 
cold, or on Sundays and holidays, like shops and 
factories. Does anyone, comfortably reading his 
morning paper in the steam-heated city, stop to 
think about the ways and means of his breakfast 
cream and butter and eggs? Does he ever stop to 
think of the effort that goes into the production 
of such simple, commonplace necessities, as milk 
and cream, butter and eggs? 

Day after day, week days, Sundays, holidays, we 
get up hours before sunrise, feed and water the 
horses, milk the cows, separate the cream, feed 
calves and hogs and hens. All this and more in 
star-lit darkness or with a pale winter moon making 
oblique, cold blue shadows in the gloom. Break¬ 
fast is at seven. The sun has risen over the tallest 
trees spilling bright color and precious jewels on 
its way, painting the white winter world with 
lacquer and gold; or the sun is lost in leaden skies, 
and the day is cold steely-gray and dull silver. 

Barns must be cleaned out, hay shaken down, 
cows released from their stanchions for a breathing 
spell outdoors, brood mare and colts put into pad- 
dock, roots run through food cutter for the stock, 
while the farm engine pumps water for house and 
barns. Grain is scalded for warm feed and innumer¬ 
able other details looked after. By this time, most 
of the morning chores are done and the week day’s 
work can begin. To-day, for instance, it is sawing 


WINTER DAYS OF LEISURE 195 

wood. The tractor has already been run to the 
woodpile and the belt connected with the power 
saw. ' 

“Gosh all thunder, where’s thet twelve-inch file?” 
It ought, of course, to be along with the rest of 
the tools, in the workshop. However, some one re¬ 
members where last he used it, and the saw is filed. 
Meanwhile the water pipes in the barn have been 
thawed out and the tractor engine starts up in the 
sweetest temper, for a wonder on a cold day. Saw¬ 
ing begins. It is a very efficient operation and a 
fascinating one to watch, another one of the many 
farm jobs, that seems crude, common labor, which, 
on the contrary, needs skill and nice judgment. One 
man brings up the long tree log and helps a sec¬ 
ond put it on the table against which the circular 
saw revolves. The second man works the table 
back and forth, and watches both tractor engine 
and saw. A third catches the sawn fire logs and 
tosses them on the pile behind him. Fence posts 
are saved out of the cedar boles, if the heartwood 
is sound. The clear, sunshiny air is filled with the 
resinous smell of pine and cedar and hemlock, and 
the pile of fire logs and sawdust grows apace. 

Noon calls a halt for dinner. All the stock is 
again fed and watered. I am called to the tele¬ 
phone, that blessed, plagued country telephone. 
“Hear yer tractor an’ th’ saw. Not goin’ t’ use 
yer traverse sleighs, be ye?” “No, indeed.” Most 
likely, the sleighs will be returned two or three 


WINGED SEEDS 


196 

days later, with a bolt or two missing. But that 
same neighbor, when no veterinary could be had, 
gave us a precious morning in silo-filling time to 
save a brood sow for her piggies. 

Mail time is come. We always welcome the 
carrier with joy. His is a long hard day, covering 
twenty-six miles of rough road in all weathers, 
stopping at every farm to take and to bring the 
mail. Nevertheless, he usually finds time to tell 
the news he hears along the way. He does not 
carry a watch. “What’s th’ use o’ hurryin’?” 

After dinner sawing continues. It is so noisy 
with the tractor puffing and the saw swishing its 
way through the logs, that the men have to shout 
at each other. It has begun to snow, but the work 
on the woodpile goes on under the protecting cedar 
branches at the edge of the woods. Woodpiles 
have stories of their own and memories. Here is 
part of a drag, there an ancient pung sleigh and old 
plank with rusty, hand-made spikes. Here a boat 
rudder, there a flag pole, and a thousand things 
besides. There are some beautiful old pine and 
cedar stumps that once fenced in our land, when 
fences were picturesque instead of being merely 
efficient. Sawing goes on until the early fall of 
dusk, and a blood-red sunset, harbinger of a cold 
night. 

While the strange after-glow still burns in the 
west, the moon rises over the bare oaks and birches 
of the drive, drawing a curtain of unearthly radi- 


WINTER DAYS OF LEISURE 197 

ance over the silent winter world. Milking, feed¬ 
ing—in short, all the morning chores are repeated 
ad infinitum. Long after dark the beasts are 
bedded down for the night. Between nine and ten 
o’clock rounds are made once more to see that all 
things are right. The night is clear and crackling 
cold. This is a normal, ordinary day without seri¬ 
ous trouble of any sort in house or in barns. 

Each succeeding winter day brings its own work. 
There is never time enough to get all the work 
done. On sunny days there is chopping and clear¬ 
ing in the woods, top-dressing the meadows on the 
snow, that is, drawing manure out of the barns and 
spreading it on grass and newly-ploughed land. 
There is cleaning up and repairing of buildings and 
unending work of similar kind. On days of storm, 
seed corn is traced up, that is, braided in long 
strings and hung up to dry in the granary. Grain 
bags, horse blankets are mended, harnesses oiled 
and cleaned and repaired, cowbarn, hog and hen¬ 
house are whitewashed, tools are looked over, re¬ 
paired, and oiled against the time of use, and in¬ 
numerable more jobs are done, all equally vital for 
the efficient up-keep of the farm. 

On Washington’s Birthday the Doctor went up 
to start our men on the dormant spraying of the 
fruit trees. A spraying outfit had been sent up, 
consisting of a truck on which was clamped a two- 
horse power gasolene engine, with a barrel spray 
and a pump. Two horses draw the truck slowly 


WINGED SEEDS 


198 

along between the rows of trees. A man drives the 
team carefully, for the snow is of many different 
levels. The second man holds the rubber hose, 
which is fitted with a fine nozzle spray. In this 
way the work can be thoroughly, quickly, and ef¬ 
ficiently done. There must be no wind, if possible. 
Lime sulphur in strong solution is used for this 
dormant spray, one gallon of the ill-smelling chem¬ 
ical to ten of water. The team is blanketed with 
old covering of some sort, old harnesses are used. 
The men wear goggles to protect their eyes and 
stand to windward of the trees. This strong spray 
combats San Jose Scale and Oyster Scale princi¬ 
pally. Except for the arsenate of lead spray at 
the time of the falling blossom petals, the dormant 
spray is the most important one of all. 

Much to my surprise I received a message, tell¬ 
ing me that the Doctor would have to remain away 
an additional day and night “on important busi¬ 
ness.” He returned bubbling with news. He could 
hardly wait until he had descended from the steps 
of the train, to say with sparkling eyes and excited 
voice: “The South Farm is a fact. I’ve bought the 
old Sattley place.” “The farm with the old red 
brick house and big weeping willow tree, and the 
cedar hedge?” I asked. “Yes, but there is no 
longer an ancient willow, nor red brick farmhouse 
with green shutters. The buildings burned down 
last week. But the hundreds of acres of tillable 
farm land and the great marsh besides, with the 


WINTER DAYS OF LEISURE 


199 

Little Otter flowing in and out through the pas¬ 
tures, with birch and maple woodlots, it is all ours! 
You know, it is said to be one of the best farms in 
the township. Wait and see what we’ll make of it. 
I’ve got dozens of plans already.” I said nothing. 
I was spell-bound. 

He went on. “I had to take an extra day and 
night, for I made arrangements to have the debris 
and wreck of the fire removed. I’ve made a con¬ 
tract to have miles of fencing done. They start 
getting out cedar posts to-day. First thing you 

do after breakfast-” “Well, I am glad you 

think there will be time to eat.” “Oh, I’m fresh as 
a daisy, or I shall be, when I’ve had a cold plunge 
and a cup or two of coffee. You see I spent last 
night drawing plans for barns and silos. Didn’t 
try to sleep.” I felt staggered mentally and spir¬ 
itually. It was such a big thing, such a tremendous 
undertaking. The Doctor was exhilaration per¬ 
sonified, as if he had had a draught of champagne, 
or some other effervescence to stir his blood. 

All these exciting things were told to me in the 
motor, on the way home from the Grand Central 
Terminal. “I’ve got to do some hustling to-day to 
make up for lost time. Have much trouble chang¬ 
ing appointments?” This was as he put his key into 
our door. He was back, you see, with his patients. 
Breakfast was a hectic meal, interspersed with tele¬ 
phone messages to his assistant and to his patients, 
with directions to me for letters to be written to a 



200 


WINGED SEEDS 


builder at Vergennes, Arthur Sorrell, by name, to 
the American Steel and Wire Company for woven 
wire, to Williams, the digger of artesian wells, 
about a new well to be sunk at the Sattley Place, as 
he would know it. For the Doctor it had already 
become our “South Farm.” The lake farm with 
the Stone House had become the “Home Place.” 
Our new farm was two and one half miles south of 
us on the Slang road. Therefore it was only a 
little over a mile from the Centre, an ideal situa¬ 
tion for a stock farm, being near to milk plant, 
creamery, railroad, school, etc. We had seen a 
part of this land that autumn, when we had ridden 
Beauty and Sliver through the beautiful white birch 
and maple thickets and over the marshy pasture 
land. The wide pastures were surrounded on every 
side by the Green Mountains, that give our be¬ 
loved Vermont its name. 

We went up to Ferrisburgh together for March 
Meeting, although women were excluded in those 
days. While the Doctor was busy at the Town 
Hall with his duties as citizen, I drove up the main 
road to see Mrs. Robinson. With her was her 
daughter Rachel, Mrs. Elmer, an artist, who lived 
in New York. I was very glad to meet her, for 
her work, particularly her unusual postcards of 
New York and its environment, had interested 
both the Doctor and me. She was sweet 
mannered and unassuming like her mother. We 
had a delightful visit sitting close to the great 


WINTER DAYS OF LEISURE 201 


hickory log fire in the old fireplace. We exchanged 
views on our favorite occupations. I remember 
that Rachel Elmer said there was nothing in the 
world she liked better to do than to pick field ber¬ 
ries in early June, when the “meadows were blue 
and gold starred like the blue and gold of the sky.’ 1 
She was gifted and happy-spirited. Life ended for 
her while she was still young. I shall never forget 
Mrs. Robinson’s splendid courage, when in her old 
age, she lost this well-beloved child. 

At Albany, on the first of May, the Doctor left 
us to go to the Adirondack Farms at Glens Falls. 
He went to look at a draft stallion, while the maids, 
the dogs, and I, with the baggage, went on to the 
farm. I had barely entered the Stone House when 
the telephone rang, long distance. What could it 
possibly be? After the usual delightful interval of 
trying to get connections, there came the Doctor’s 
voice over the wire. “I could not wait until to¬ 
night. I have bought the most perfect young Bel¬ 
gian draft stallion. There has never been anything 
finer in all the county. Meet me at Vergennes on 
the arrival of the Flyer.” 

So, instead of attending to my duties as home 
maker, and helping to awaken the Stone House 
from its winter sleep, I drove with Sliver and 
Scotty to the station. Scotty knew perfectly well 
that we were driving to meet his beloved master. 
When the train whistled for the stop, he flew out 
of the Concord, that most comfortable 1 of hand- 


202 


WINGED SEEDS 


made carriages, and ran along the platform down 
to the parlor car. Howls of joy pierced the air. 
Conductors, brakemen, and porters knew the black 
spaniel, for he always greeted the train with the 
same shrill cries and barks. When at last master 
and dog got through their excited welcome, and 
when suitcases were deposited under the seat, we 
drove home. 

And then I heard the whole tale anent the most 
wonderful young draft stallion in the world. He 
was bay in color, perfect in every way, would take 
blue ribbons at County Fairs, and would give a 
splendid impetus to the quality of draft teams in 
our township. There was only one drawback. He 
was named Poltron. “How could anyone have 
given the name Coward to the beautiful, spirited, 
high-bred colt? We will call him Boileau, the name 
of his sire.” To preserve the right of registry to 
his get, however, and in conformance with the rules 
of the American Association of Importers and 
Breeders of Belgian Draft Horses, his formal 
name must remain Poltron. The amusing thing 
was this. Eventually his pet name came to be 
Polly. How it happened, no one at Big Oak Farm 
could tell. Think of a huge stallion, weighing at 
maturity more than two thousand pounds, answer¬ 
ing to the name of Polly! He is the gentlest, 
dearest creature. He has his blue ribbons. His 
progeny are all over our township and many ad¬ 
joining ones. His favorite tid-bit is a chew of to- 


WINTER DAYS OF LEISURE 203 

bacco, which queer taste he has transmitted to a 
number of his get. 

At our farmhouse lived Alice and Ernest Curler. 
We had come to know Ernest years before, when 
he worked for the Kimballs at Basin Harbour, and 
was courting Alice. He was a big, over-grown, 
happy-go-lucky boy. One of his daily duties was 
to exercise Polly. To watch Ernest, who was more 
than six feet tall, seated in a jolting road cart, 
with the great horse trotting contentedly along the 
road, was a funny sight. There is another thing 
I recall about Ernest. He invariably spoke of 
“bugging” potatoes, cabbages, and other green 
growing things. Translated into English, this 
means spraying potatoes with Paris Green, or 
sprinkling salt, lime, or woodashes, on cabbages, 
cauliflower, melons, and so on, to prevent the rav¬ 
ages of bugs and worms. All in all, I think Alice 
Curler was my favorite of all our farm mothers. 
She was so placid and so sweet-tempered. 

About this time an exciting thing came to pass. 
A real, live, new baby came to Alice and Ernest, the 
first child born at Big Oak Farm. Early one morn¬ 
ing the Doctor was called to our farmhouse by the 
Vergennes physician, who had spent the night there, 
and when I awoke, I heard the great news. The 
Doctor said we must have a celebration on that 
very evening. Somehow we had the most remark¬ 
able luck with our celebrations. It was just the 
right sort of night, with just enough of the right 


204 


WINGED SEEDS 


sort of wind for bonfires on the lake shore, and for 
luminous balloons. As our glimmering balloons were 
released, to go sailing off into the night, each one 
of us called out a good wish for Alice and the baby. 
“Almost as good as the proverbial fairies, who are 
supposed to shower gifts on a new-born child,” the 
Doctor said. 


CHAPTER EIGHTEEN 


MORE BUILDING MORE PROBLEMS MORE JOYS 
PRUNING APPLE TREES 

W E thought our life had been full of plans 
and planning for many winters. Yet all 
past scheming had been as nothing compared with 
the adventure of the South Farm. The Home 
Place with its problems almost dropped into the 
background for the time being, or so it seemed. 
The daily press, the magazines, the very air was 
redolent with the slogan: “Help to feed the allies, 
help to crush the Germans. Every backyard must 
be a war garden.” “Think,” said the Doctor, “of 
the hundreds and hundreds of acres of war garden 
we shall have to get ready this spring. We shall 
have to order tons and tons of fertilizer, carloads 
of lime, thousands of pounds of seed. If only Sor¬ 
rell will be able to keep his word and get the farm¬ 
house and dairy and power house finished in time 
for spring work.” 

Meanwhile Williams and his men were at work 
on the sinking of the new artesian well. They had 
struck quicksand, which meant trouble and delay. 
As soon as they felt certain they had about reached 

water, the shifting and seemingly bottomless sand 

205 


20 6 


WINGED SEEDS 


filtered in, put the machinery out of gear and made 
it necessary to start all over again. 

The builder had a large force of men at work 
on farmhouse and farm buildings, all going up at 
the same time. Either the Doctor or I went up 
twice each month to watch progress and to settle 
mooted points. The dwelling house was to be 
built along the same lines as the farmhouse on the 
Home Place. It was also to have running water, 
hot and cold, and a bathroom. Close by was the 
well they were trying so hard to sink. As yet there 
was nothing to show for it but a pile of gray sand, 
much puffing of engines, and more swearing. The 
power and dairy house with milk refrigerating 
room were all three under one roof, close to the 
problematic well. I asked Williams whether, after 
all, his magic wand had refused to work? His 
manners did not permit him to say what his 
thoughts were on the subject. He looked a number 
of things. 

The Doctor’s plans, put into technical form by 
the builder, called for a quadrangle around which 
were grouped horse barn, cow barn with two big 
silos, and a calf barn. The open quadrangle was 
to be used as a sheltered, sunny paddock in winter 
time, for the daily exercise of work teams and of 
cattle, also for the big Holstein-Friesian bull, who 
headed our herd. The buildings all had concrete 
foundations and floors. Later we found that 
planked floors for both horse barn and cow barn, 


MORE BUILDING 


207 


were more practical and efficient. In our cold win¬ 
ters, cement gets dangerously slippery in freezing 
weather. In each building there was running water. 
There was a small hay barn out in the meadow be¬ 
yond the house. This building the Doctor intended 
to move near to the quadrangle group, and to en¬ 
large by adding an ell at each end and an upper 
story. This upper floor would have bins with 
shutes, to be used as a granary. There was already 
a corn crib, which needed some repairs, but was 
otherwise practicable. 

At some little distance from the house, to the 
north among old apple trees, a big hog house was 
in process of building, with a smaller hen house 
at one end. The buildings each and every one were 
so constructed that the stock they housed would 
have sufficient sun and air. The builder could not 
satisfy the Doctor with the number of windows he 
planned to put in. The hog house, too, had an up¬ 
per floor, for the purpose of storing food for the 
hogs, so that no unnecessary trips to granary need 
be made. All the buildings had water-pipe con¬ 
nections sunk at least four feet under ground, so as 
to be below frost line. 

There was a hundred-acre hay meadow along the 
highway. Its north end was close to the birch 
woods near the Slang Bridge over the Little Otter, 
the Slang, as the narrow stream is here called. A 
huge hay barn was in process of construction there, 
with bays for storing big farm implements, like 


208 


WINGED SEEDS 


thresher, corn harvester, hay loader, and so on. 
The big, level meadow was very beautiful, particu¬ 
larly when seen from anywhere inside the fences. 
It was ringed all about with blue hills and deep 
green woods. From the center of it, the highroad 
appeared a dusty white ribbon, somehow unimport¬ 
ant as compared with the meadow. All this fertile 
land can be seen from the road. Yet driving into 
the big field itself, gives one a distinctly different 
aspect, a much wider, much more beautiful one. 
Every soft outline is so clearly etched, that its in¬ 
herent beauty is multiplied a hundred fold. 

Sorrell promised to have the house ready to live 
in by the first of March for the new farm family 
we had found, but April came before it was habit¬ 
able. By that time the artesian well was sunk, hun¬ 
dreds of feet deep; and the pump and engine were 
installed. The buildings were sufficiently far ad¬ 
vanced so that it was possible to use them, although 
work would have to continue for the greater part 
of another year. How the Doctor enjoyed it all, 
the planning, the directing, the many problems, the 
many obstacles! 

There was an old apple orchard on the place of 
upward of one hundred trees. Among them were 
Rhode Island Greenings, old-fashioned delicious 
Russets, Northern Spys, as beautiful as any apple 
grown, and more tasty than most, the inevitable 
Crabs and Ben Davis, the latter the most tasteless 
apple in the world, although a good keeper. The 














Draft Mare with Colt One Day Old. 





MORE BUILDING 


209 


trees were in greater or less need of repair. Part 
of the pasture adjoining the orchard was fenced in 
and ploughed in readiness to set out a young or¬ 
chard of approximately two hundred trees for a be¬ 
ginning. 

The Doctor had bought two additional heavy 
draft teams. One of the four was a pure-bred Bel¬ 
gian mare, named Margot. He expected to raise 
some splendid big draft colts out of Margot and 
Poltron. All these farm problems, absorbing as 
they were, were in the last analysis, play for the 
man of dreams. They were “joys,” not problems. 
Without doubt, it was the greatest relaxation in the 
world for him. His professional work had grown 
to almost impossible proportions. How he carried 
all his burden of work and still greater burden of 
responsibility, I never understood. I never shall 
understand. I worried tremendously about it all, 
and above everything, I was worried about him. 
I told him so. “You don’t quite see the logic of 
this thing. The problems of the farm seem to you 
complex. They are pure joy for me, they are ab¬ 
solute relaxation.” He found time to direct charity 
and educational community work, and to do occa¬ 
sional lecturing and writing; he was a veritable 
dynamo of concentrated energy. 

Yet I knew, I realized, that he was burning his 
candle at both ends. His friends and patients were 
concerned about his health. “He ought not to work 
so hard.” His friend President Butler of Colum- 


210 


WINGED SEEDS 


bia University expressed the general feeling, when 
he said: “You work too hard. Get assistants to 
look after part of your practice, but don’t send one 
of them to me.” When I remonstrated with him, 
“nagged,” he called it, he said: “Death! What 
matter, so long as it comes quickly, at flood tide. 
However, just at present we want to get our stock 
farm into shape as promptly as may be. Two or 
three years more of medical work and New York 
—and then our real life will begin.” 

Early in April I went up to the farm. I did not 
open the Stone House, but lived at our farm house, 
where I was very comfortable. Ida Field, the farm 
mother at this time, was an excellent housekeeper, 
helpful and pleasant. I had come to supervise and 
to help to prune the young apple trees. Of all work 
in the open, I think I love pruning best. It is in¬ 
teresting, not over tiring, with time and opportunity 
to see and to hear and to smell. There are so many 
myriad sights and sounds and smells under God’s 
open sky. Each has its deep underlying reason for 
being, its deep inner connection with all the rest. 
The wonder of nature is that no one single thing 
stands alone. It is all a miracle of related and in¬ 
terrelated phenomena, each one perhaps intrins¬ 
ically insignificant, yet each one an unbreakable 
thread in the wondrous warp and woof of the whole. 

We worked on the apple trees every bright day, 
each with our pruning shears and our curved prun¬ 
ing knife surgically clean and very sharp to begin 


MORE BUILDING 


21 I 


with. We cut out interfering branches and too 
heavy ones, aiming at symmetry and breadth rather 
than at height. Always we were careful to make a 
diagonal cut away from the little tree trunk; diag¬ 
onal so that water would run off, as it runs off a 
sloping roof; away from the trunk, so as not to 
injure the bark, thereby making a wound or opening 
for fungous growth, rot, or insect burrowers. At 
the same time we cut off suckers around the base, 
and weeds, such as bindweed, or wild morning 
glory. It was joyous, splendid work. Hours flew 
by unnoticed, while daily the sun climbed higher, 
and dusk fell later. 

Our young trees were protected from the ravages 
of field mice and of rabbits by heavy wire screening. 
Here and there the screens had become loosened 
and the bark had been chewed. We trimmed the 
loose edges of the bark and painted the wound with 
an antiseptic tar paint. Finally the trees were cared 
for. They were still asleep, dead in seeming. Deep 
down, their hearts were beating in tune with all 
awakening nature. 

I said: “Oh, Jim, won’t it be wonderful when all 
these trees are in bloom, in starry snowdrifts of pink 
and white!” “Sure, it’ll be pretty. But ye an’ th’ 
th’ Doc’ an’ me, we’ll be among th’ missin’.” In 
which pessimistic philosophy there is tragic truth. 

We saw great flocks of wild geese flying north, 
in their usual wedge-shaped battle array, with sen¬ 
tinels front and rear. We saw multitudes of red- 


212 


WINGED SEEDS 


winged blackbirds returning, in companies so large 
that they settled in the bare trees, like big black 
storm clouds. Only these storm clouds chattered 
and piped and whistled gaily. We heard orioles 
and warblers of many kinds. There were countless 
robins, happy and impertinent as only robins can 
be. I think I love the robins and phcebes and 
wrens best of all the birds that come to us. They 
are indifferent musicians, but what they lack in song, 
they make up in neighborliness. Phoebes made 
nests in our columns on the porches. They are bad 
housekeepers, yet I love their friendly nearness and 
their fearlessness. 

We took the burlap winding sheets off the rose¬ 
bushes, and I pruned the dead wood. We unbound 
the currants, pruned them to shape, and cut off all 
dead canes. The raspberries had been pruned in 
autumn, as they should be. As soon after bearing 
as practicable, the canes that have fruited must be 
cut out, close to the ground. They never bear 
again, merely leaf out the succeeding year and take 
sap and strength for leaf formation, that should go 
into fruit. Then came the turn of the purple bar¬ 
berry hedge that we had set out two years before. 
It leads from the gate posts into the drive. Lynn 
Cushman, our rural mail carrier, said they were 
“the prettiest thing I sight in early spring.” The 
barberries are beautiful; they are so cheery in win¬ 
ter with their red-purple color against the white 
and gray of snow and sky. 


MORE BUILDING 


213 


In the horse barn on the Home Place, two thor¬ 
oughbred fillies had already arrived. “Your future 
driving team,” the Doctor said. 

When the Doctor came up to take me back to 
New York, he had a hundred details to look after 
at the South Farm. There were so many that he 
left the Lake Farm to me. All the farm tools, the 
heavy wagons and trucks, the draft horses, except 
Poltron, the big stallion, the work harnesses and all 
the rest of the work outfit, was to be transferred to 
the South Farm before our return for the summer 
on the first of May. 

We hated to return to New York, although it 
was only for so short a time. We had to buy farm 
equipment. First of all we bought litter carriers, 
with tracks to carry manure from stalls to manure 
pit. The carriers are much like the old-fashioned 
baskets running on wires and pulleys in city depart¬ 
ment stores, only in giant size. We bought indi¬ 
vidual drinking bowls for the cows, with their ac¬ 
companying paraphernalia. These drinking bowls 
can be used only where there is running water in 
the barns. They are very ingenious. In the bot¬ 
tom of the metal bowl, there is a valve. When the 
cow tries to get the last drop of water, she touches 
the valve. It opens and permits the water from 
the standard pipe to refill the bowl. We bought the 
most sanitary cow stanchions, a complete milking 
outfit, including milking machine, Babcock milk 
tester, and all the rest of the thousand and one 


214 


WINGED SEEDS 


things needed to make our barns up to date, sani¬ 
tary, and efficient in every possible way. Time 
would certainly not hang heavy on our hands. The 
question in my mind was: How on earth were we 
ever going to get things into shape: the land pre¬ 
pared for seeding, the new apple trees planted, the 
old orchard cared for, and all the other details at 
the South Farm worked out, not to mention the 
problems at the Lake Farm? 

In the drawing room, on the night trip to New 
York, the Doctor said to me: “I forgot to tell you. 
Guess what I’ve named the two thoroughbred fil¬ 
lies? Mary and Martha.” “You didn’t!” “Well, 
you are familiar with the Bible story. The first 
time we drive those fillies, in two or three years 
from now, you will understand.” To this day,— 
they are no longer bay fillies but bay mares—Mary 
accepts life serenely, and Martha fusses about each 
little thing. 

“Do you still consider farming a game, an ad¬ 
venture,” I asked? “Gosh, yes. A game of games. 
An endless chain of adventure, a mobile perpetu- 
um. }> I felt breathless, as if I were in a mill race, 
or as if I were among the trees and houses that 
rushed past us in the night. 


CHAPTER NINETEEN 


COMMUNITY IDEALS THE RACE TRACK 
FARMING IN DOWNRIGHT EARNEST 

D ESPITE his unending strings of problems, or 
as the Doctor expressed it, “his unending 
chain of adventure,” with the South Farm and the 
Home Place, he planned to rebuild the district 
schoolhouse nearest to us, called the Porterborough 
School. It was in decrepit condition, hot in summer, 
cold in winter, with desks and windows so placed 
that no one but the teacher had even fair light. The 
floor and the roof sagged. Doors were off their 
hinges. As soon as school closed for the summer, 
the work of repairing the building was begun. Two 
small wings were added each side of the main build¬ 
ing, new clapboards put where needed, the roof, 
doors, windows, and shutters were repaired. More 
windows were cut; desks were put into decent condi¬ 
tion. Last of all a new floor was laid, and colonial 
drop trimming added to the outside to give a deco¬ 
rative touch. Then the whole building, inside and 
out, was painted and varnished, and the premises 
cleaned thoroughly. 

Before the new session began, I conferred with 
the teacher, and we hung shades and pictures, and 

215 


WINGED SEEDS 


216 

filled window sills with potted plants. We were 
happy when everything was ready for the children, 
and looked so spick and span. On the opening day, 
teacher and pupils appeared, as always, expectant 
and dressed in their best. They were overjoyed at 
the improvements. “It is not all a question of com¬ 
fort,” said the Doctor to me, as we rode back to 
the lake. “How can one expect boys and girls to 
have a sense of order and decency, not to speak of a 
sense of beauty, if their very school home is sun¬ 
less, dingy, and going to pieces?” 

About this time we became intimately acquainted 
with the Rev. Father Vezina, whose church was at 
Vergennes. His parish was large, including many 
miles of farm land outside the limits of the town. 
He was a man of broad education and of musical 
ability. He was ever ready to give help where help 
was needed, in his parish and outside it. He took 
a deep interest in all things civic in the community. 
He worked hard to give the city of Vergennes a 
purer water supply. He was vitally interested in 
the State Industrial School, situated near the town. 
The Doctor and he planned to do a number of things 
along educational and civic lines in our township 
and beyond. Both men were deeply interested in 
the training of defectives, of whom we have so de¬ 
plorably large a number in rural communities, a 
number, so large, unfortunately, that our provision 
for their scientifically-trained care and instruction is 
pitifully limited. 


COMMUNITY IDEALS 


217, 


For many years the study of defectives of all 
grades and the science of improvement in their care 
and instruction was a subject very near to the 
Doctor’s heart. It was never out of his mind. It 
was a subject, it is to this day a subject, for state¬ 
wide endeavor. Much improvement has been made, 
but we are only at the beginning of the work. We 
have touched only the veriest embryo of this ques¬ 
tion. A question that touches closely every phase 
of home life, of community life, of state life, of 
national life. 

Both the Doctor and Father Vezina were un¬ 
daunted optimists. They were full of energy and 
had the willingness to work. Rural communities 
are slow to make changes in their accustomed rou¬ 
tine of life and endeavor. The two men found, as 
reformers are *pt to do, that their great asset must 
be unbounded patience, added to unbounded opti¬ 
mism and enthusiasm. 

“We’ll have Utopia,’’ I said to them one night at 
dinner at the Stone House. “We’ll take a shot at 
it, anyway,” the Doctor answered. “I wish you 
would start your Utopian schemes with our roads. 
Goodness knows, they need it.” Our township of 
Ferrisburgh has ninety miles or more of roads, all 
dirt, and mostly clay. What this means no one un¬ 
derstands who has not lived in a clay-road district. 
It means deep, sticky ruts of mud in spring and after 
rains; deep, hard ruts after the hot summer’s sun has 
baked the clay. Eventually the Doctor got our 


2l8 


WINGED SEEDS 


neighbors tremendously interested in road better¬ 
ment. Then, too, motors and motor trucks were 
beginning to come into common use, making the im¬ 
provement of our roads an absolute necessity. 

Here also, we have made improvements. But 
here, too, we have made only a beginning. Until 
we build comparatively permanent roads we can 
never hope to improve agricultural conditions. De¬ 
bates in Montpelier and in Washington will not do 
it. Nor will the granting of Federal Farm Loans 
to deserving farmers. If we want fair prices for our 
produce, and despite the help of a paternal govern¬ 
ment we are not getting adequate return, we must 
first of all make good roads. Then will follow in 
logical sequence a clearer understanding of farm 
conditions. Producer and consumer will be brought 
into spiritual, into actual close communion. As far 
back as 1908 President Roosevelt, man of vision as 
well as man of action, appointed a Country Com¬ 
mission to inquire into agricultural conditions. He 
knew, none better, that upon its farms depends the 
weal and woe of a nation. One of the salient ne¬ 
cessities the Commission recommended, was good 
roads. Transportation facilities, on which in return 
depend schools, health, physical as well as mental, 
prices of produce and so on. 

The causeway over the Slang needed repair. Our 
selectmen planned as before, to sink wooden cradles, 
that is, logs laid crosswise and filled with stone. 
The Doctor persuaded them to make concrete foun- 


COMMUNITY IDEALS 


219 


dation piers, which necessitated greater immediate 
expenditure, but it meant permanency. Winter 
storms and spring freshets cannot rot cement. 

The Doctor was vitally interested in community 
buying and selling. He worked for the betterment 
of stock of all kinds and argued the necessity for the 
highest type of sire, be it ram or boar, bull or stal¬ 
lion. He planned to drain the marsh and to use the 
fertile black muck for cranberry bogs. His plans 
and schemes were endless. To them all he brought 
his virile, clear-thinking mind, his unceasing willing¬ 
ness to help, his infectious enthusiasm, his un¬ 
bounded belief in the ultimate good of all things. 
His magnetism was felt by and influenced all with 
whom he came in contact. “He radiates sparks,” 
two men of utterly different type, class, and occupa¬ 
tion said to me. I called it hypnotism, much to his 
disgust. 

All these extraneous interests and many others 
did not prevent him from wrestling with our own 
and immediate farm problems. He hired men and 
he trained them. He supervised their work. He 
bought improved farm tools. He helped to set 
them up, and to repair them when they got out of 
kilter. He kept everyone at work and radiated 
good will and cheer. He was always ready to give 
help and advice, to dress hurts and to condone mis¬ 
takes. He argued with the drinker, and cheered up 
the despondent. His patience was wonderful to 
me. He found time to be interested in every last 


220 


WINGED SEEDS 


little thing, from a maid’s love affairs to a break in 
our preserving sterilizer. 

His daily mail was enormous. True, letters re¬ 
mained unopened for weeks at a time. Eventually 
they too were disposed of. I was able to be of 
some little help with this mass of clerical work. 
He hated what he called “the sordid details,” let¬ 
ters, accounts, and worst of all, bills. “Don’t ask 
me to verify, pay them.” 

Meanwhile he had bought a carload of fertilizer 
from the American Agricultural Chemical Com¬ 
pany, and had been in active correspondence with 
their chemical expert, Dr. Wheeler. During the 
summer Dr. Wheeler came to our farm with young 
Mr. Bradley, the son of the Company’s president. 
They remained over night, and Dr. Wheeler tested 
our various soils and prescribed remedies. The 
South Farm needed lime more than fertilizer. The 
soil had become acid. There is a lime kiln at New 
Haven, two miles south of Vergennes, on the Rut¬ 
land Road. It is owned by the Green Mountain 
Lime Company. From there large quantities of 
lime were drawn. This lime was stored away and 
was to be spread on the melting snow in early spring. 
In that way it is incorporated with the soil by the 
snow water. This is much the same as top-dressing 
of grass land or ploughed land with manure on the 
snow. 

In the old orchard two men were at work. They 
did the same renovating that old Ben had done at 


COMMUNITY IDEALS 


221 


the Lake Farm. They cut down dead and dying 
trees, sawed off dead branches, scraped loose and 
decaying bark, cleaned out hollows and filled them 
with cement. This filling of tree hollows is akin to 
the dentist’s work on a hollow and decayed tooth. 
Neither the tooth nor the tree is ready to be filled 
until it is surgically clean; until it is freed of all 
decaying pulp. The men cut off suckers and water 
sprouts, which take from the tree necessary sap and 
strength. At last the orchard was fenced in and a 
dozen hogs turned into it. They spent their days 
grazing off everything green, and eating windfalls. 
At sundown they were grained and watered. In a 
comparatively short time the hogs literally ploughed 
that old orchard, and grew fat in the doing. The 
young trees had been planted and were doing splen¬ 
didly. No doubt, the South Farm was better 
adapted for apple-growing than the Lake Farm, 
where the land was so much lower, and consequently, 
less well drained. 

There were a number of different sorts of soil on 
the South Place. Some clay and clay loam, some 
sand, but mostly it was rich black loam, splendid 
for grain, for potatoes, for garden truck. Sixty or 
more acres were planted to fodder and to field corn, 
over one hundred acres to oats and wheat and bar¬ 
ley. All these grains are beautiful in growth. Best 
of all I love a field of barley. I cannot imagine any¬ 
thing lovelier than a great waving field of green- 
gold, bearded barley. Ten acres were planted to 


222 


WINGED SEEDS 


potatoes. This seed, after being cut to seed eyes 
was treated with formaldehyde spray like the grain. 
There were a number of acres also of mangle beets, 
rutabagas, and of stock carrots. These are sweet 
giant beets, turnips, and carrots used for green fod¬ 
der in winter. Roots are an expensive crop in a 
way. They need much cultivating, which, of course, 
is done with a two-horse riding cultivator. They 
are cut up before being fed. But they take the place 
of green feed in cold weather and are much relished 
by all stock, from hens and hogs to horses and cows. 
For hog feed the roots must be cooked and mixed 
into a soft mash. For this purpose there was a big 
cauldron in the hog house, with a wood-burning 
attachment. 

Fertilizer was used in quantities from two to 
three hundred pounds to the acre with all of these 
crops—fertilizer of different grades and various 
formulae, as required by each. 

Near the dwelling house was a big field of buck¬ 
wheat, planted on worn-out soil for the purpose of 
ploughing under after the blow. This procedure is 
one of the best soil fertility restorers. On this plot 
of five or six acres, the Doctor planned eventually to 
try alfalfa. He intended to inoculate the soil, as 
recommended by the Department of Agriculture. 
He had great hopes of alfalfa, and was eager to 
make the experiment, especially, as most of the old 
farmers predicted failure. Another adventure. 

All this time the South Farm, or that part of it 


COMMUNITY IDEALS 


223 


where stood the farmhouse and the farm buildings, 
was a beehive of workers, a restless place of ham¬ 
mering on wood and metal, of blasting, of concrete 
work. A dozen operations were going on, all at 
the same time. Each morning, after going over the 
Home Place barns, and doling out the work to the 
men, the Doctor rode Beauty down to the stock 
farm, where he directed all the many farm and 
building activities, where he answered innumerable 
questions. By this time all farm implements, work 
wagons, draft horses, in short, the working outfit, 
was no longer at the Lake Farm. Cows, calves, and 
work teams were at home in their new quarters. 

Our horse barn at the lake was in beautiful order 
and had in it only driving and riding horses, 
brood mares and colts, and the two young stallions, 
the draft stallion, Poltron, familiarly called Polly, 
and a trotting-bred young stallion, Vermont Tod- 
dington, nicknamed Toddy. He was out of Madge 
Wildfire, and a beautiful bay, our favorite color. 
Justice Bingen still was the precious and especial 
cause of pride and joy for the Doctor. He took 
great pride too in his horse barn and in his harness 
room, as well as in their contents. The cow-end of 
the barn had been rebuilt and turned into a carriage 
room, with awnings to let down for protection. 
Many other improvements had been made in the 
last two years. The Home Place, or as I liked to 
call it, the Lake Farm, looked at last as if it had 
been in existence untold years. It was pure joy to 


224 


WINGED SEEDS 


come back to its quiet and settledness from all the 
noise and turmoil at the South place. 

On Sundays we went on exploring expeditions 
through our big pastures and woods. The Doctor 
pored over old maps and histories of Vermont. He 
had come upon a number of interesting facts. Far 
away in a distant pasture, near the Slang were sup¬ 
posed to be mineral springs, once used by the Iro¬ 
quois to cure many ills. We rode and we walked 
and we hunted all over, through birch and maple 
and willow thickets and in little open glades. At 
last one day we discovered a spring that was not 
entirely clogged up and filled in by the silt and the 
dead leaves of years. In it was the skeleton of a 
cow. The spring was in a charming ferny dell of 
white birch and hawthorn. When the Doctor had 
it cleaned out, and the lonely skeleton was buried, 
the spring bubbled and sparkled, and tasted like an 
iron and beef tonic. I hope the poor, drowned cow 
had nothing to do with it. 

We discovered that originally the old Sattley 
Place, our South Farm and all the land and farms 
for many miles in every direction, had been a land 
grant from an English king to a favorite subject, 
one Church. Strange, by what right, divine or of 
earth, a crowned head in a distant land feels he has 
power supreme to dispose of land, land that is his 
no more than God’s firmament, the sun ^nd moon 
and the everlasting stars are his! Is it strange, the 
hatred of the aborigine for the white man, who 


COMMUNITY IDEALS 


225 


drove him, the owner of all the broad land, to the 
wall, who feels justified in banishing him, the free 
man, to a fenced-in few miles, called a reservation? 
There is nothing more tragic in all human history 
than the downfall of our aborigines. True, there 
must always be the survival of the fittest. The fate¬ 
ful undercurrent of all civilization, that every once 
in so often is brought home to us by some dire 
prophecy anent the end of the world, a final cata¬ 
clysm of all things, as they are known and under¬ 
stood by us to-day. 

Across the high road from our partly finished hay 
barn by the Slang Bridge, there was a splendid 
grove of locusts. In prowling through this grove 
we found part of what once seemed to have been a 
house foundation. We found a few rusty, hand- 
forged hinges, and came to the conclusion that here 
on this hill must have stood the original dwelling 
house; or at least, so we liked to believe. We called 
it the Church Foundation, and wove a romance out 
of part of a stone wall and some old iron. Two 
men with a team were picking up stone and clearing 
the adjoining pasture land, as the Doctor wished to 
plough and to fence it and turn it into meadow. 
Among tangly undergrowth we discovered cherry 
trees grown wild, and rosebushes, that must have 
been planted there originally. We rejoiced. Our 
chain of evidence seemed complete with the finding 
of the dear old cinnamon rose bushes, the many¬ 
leaved, fragrant little pink rose of olden time. 


226 


WINGED SEEDS 


“Here’s the hedge for your rose garden,” said the 
Doctor, “waiting for you.” 

We dug up some dozens of seedling roses out of 
the old tangle, and set out our hedge to border the 
rose garden, between it and the drive. The seed¬ 
lings lived and thrived and eventually grew into a 
beautiful great hedge that is covered in June with 
thousands of tiny, fragrant roses. In autumn the 
glossy green leaves turn to deep, soft red, like cop¬ 
per in need of polish. Insects do not trouble the 
cinnamon rose. It needs no spraying, and no winter 
protection; and it is a veritable colony of bird nests. 

We had so many raspberries that we gave our 
neighbors large quantities, ate them three times a 
day, made jelly, the most delicious and beautifully- 
colored jelly of all. We made dozens of pints of 
old-fashioned raspberry shrub and vinegar. Our 
vegetable garden was everything we could wish for. 
My clumps of perennials looked and acted and 
bloomed as if they felt thoroughly at home. They 
were happy; flowers have cheerful dispositions. 
They are wonderfully grateful for care and atten¬ 
tion. A few tiny apples were set on the oldest of 
our young trees. Our lawns looked as if they had 
been lawns all their natural lives, instead of being 
grafted on forest floor. Our drive grew more and 
more beautiful. Work was done from time to time 
on the drive and in the woodland and clearings 
about it on lowery days, when the clay land was too 
wet for work. 


COMMUNITY IDEALS 


227 


No grain had been planted on the Home Place. 
“This is our home,” the Doctor said. “I want it to 
be park land, and wild, cleared woods. All we want 
to grow at the lake is apples and hay, vegetables 
and flowers, content and peace, beauty and joy.” 
“Do you think you have about finished here at the 
lake?” I asked. “Lord, no. I want to clear the 
deep woods trail west of the ravine. Also I am 
thinking of making a race track in the big East or¬ 
chard, for exercising our horses and for trial races. 
It is a long way to drive to the Centre and back, 
seven miles all told, before you can begin trying out 
a horse.” 

Before we returned to New York in October, a 
half-mile track was surveyed and laid out in the or¬ 
chard. Woven wire was ordered to fence it on both 
sides so that no accident might befall the young 
trees. They laid out the track in such wise that only 
a small number of trees had to be transplanted. 

We had become sufficiently acclimatized to call 
our midday meal dinner, like our neighbors. One 
day our dinner hour came and passed. We neither 
saw the Doctor nor heard from him. I telephoned 
the farmhouse. “The Doctor is in the East or¬ 
chard.” I walked over and found him seated under 
a great, lonely elm with one of his beloved Greek 
books, reading, dreaming. I came quite close be¬ 
fore he saw me. “You, here, what’s happened?” 

“Oh, only- Do you know what time it is?” 

“Haven’t the ghost of an idea.” “Well, it’s past 



228 


WINGED SEEDS 


three.” “Lord, I’ve had such a glorious time. 
Track’s laid out, here and here and here. Won’t it 
be fun exercising Madge and Toddy, the Bingen 
colt and all the rest of them right here at home in 
this beautiful orchard, with our hills, and our lake 
in sight every minute, and with the birds and the 
winds to keep one company? You said something 
about dinner. Hope you had yours. I’m not in a 
dinner mood.” 

He closed his Euripides, and slipped it into one 
of his many pockets. “What a bore meals and regu¬ 
lar hours are, anyway! We’ll go over to the Stone 
House and get Mary to put us up some sandwiches. 
Let’s take the launch into Lewis Creek. I want to 
get away from things and talk to you about a book 
that’s crystallizing, and about something else— 
something very exciting I’ve been turning over in 
my mind for some little time.” His friend who first 
called him the man of dreams was not far from the 
truth. 

With our tea basket and sandwiches and Scotty 
we started out in the launch and sailed north 
through the broad lake into the placid waters of 
Lewis Creek. We anchored under a splendid an¬ 
cient willow where quiet pastures faded into blue 
misted hills. By that time the Doctor asked for his 
tea and for something to eat. Through smoke 
clouds of one of the favorite pipes—“The book will 
keep. It’s about art and psychology. The exciting 
thing is this. There is nothing to be frightened 


COMMUNITY IDEALS 


229 


about. Your eyes are big as saucers. What do you 
think about making this coming winter the last one 
of our medical practice in town?” I gasped. “It 
will be difficult to break away. But the wrench will 
be no less great in a year or two more. Long¬ 
distance farming is not easy and is very expensive. 
We don’t get results. And I—well, between you 
and me, there are times when I am a bit tired. 
We’ll sell our house, which will give us a nest egg. 
We’ll take everything we love best up here and give 
away the rest. No more telephones. No more ap¬ 
pointments.” I interrupted: “No more long, 
lonely evenings.” “Yes, I shall be at home every 
night. That’s one of the drawbacks.—Think of 
harvest and of autumn with all its color, in peace, 
without packing up to return to New York. Think 
of the first snow, of woodfires, of books, of music; 
the quiet, the utter peace of it.” 


CHAPTER TWENTY 


WINGS ARE FULL-GROWN ON THE SEEDS OF DREAMS 

S ELECTION in a home of twenty years or more 
is not the easiest thing in the world. Books, 
pictures, rugs, and all the rest of the inanimate 
environment of formative years, of years of en¬ 
deavor, of years of accomplishment, have intimate, 
compelling associations. The survival of the fit¬ 
test, meaning those we love best and cannot seem 
to do without, are more than possibly can be per¬ 
mitted to survive. Finally it was done. 

A far greater, a heart-rending difficulty was 
breaking off our medical work. Our patients felt 
as if the end of all things had come for them. They 
refused to believe that their beloved physician and 
counselor would be theirs no longer. He had to 
give endless promises of help, if dire need arose. 
And indeed, he was called upon countless times and 
responded. The last week of office appointments 
was the hardest time we ever remembered. The 
Doctor was a wreck mentally and spiritually, and 
had lost many pounds in weight. Yet, even those 
long days of stress and strain were over at last. 
We looked forward with deepest joy to making 

the Stone House on the lake our permanent, our 

230 


WINGS ARE FULL-GROWN 231 

real home; yet, when we turned the key for the last 
time in our home of many years, it was with a feel¬ 
ing of almost tragic finality. Part of our life was 
ended. It was a strange feeling, part pain, part 
joy, like the folksongs of the world, the Leit Motif 
that is underneath all life, all happiness—“Alles 
Irdische verhallt,” nothing can last, only death, with 
its background of eternity. 

When we arrived at the Stone House, knowing 
that it was “for keeps,” as the Doctor said, it 
seemed unreal, a waking dream. But when the 
teams arrived with our carload of miscellaneous 
crates and bales, barrels and boxes, there was need 
for much action. Dreams had to be relegated to 
the time of falling snow and leaping flame. 

We had thought the Stone House attractive with 
its simple, temporary furniture and its comparatively 
bare rooms. When all our favorite home things, 
family relics and our own gathering of years were 
in place, it was indeed satisfying. The Doctor had 
his books and prints and bronzes in his study and 
in the hall beyond. We had our pictures and our 
music, our furniture and our rugs and all the deco¬ 
rative bits of pottery and ceramics and glass, the 
brass and copper and silver we both loved. We 
spent rainy days and countless evenings well into the 
night, getting things placed where they seemed 
happiest. The Doctor enjoyed all this fussing infi¬ 
nitely more than I did, possibly because having 
things well balanced, “just right,” meant more to his 


232 


WINGED SEEDS 


innately artistic soul than to my mere work-a-day 
sense of fitness and order. 

During all these days the work on both farms 
went on in the even tenor of its way, or I should 
rather say, in the tremendously complex tenor of its 
way. On our drive from the station to the lake that 
first morning, we saw the hay barn on rollers in 
process of taking its place near the quadrangle of 
buildings on the South Farm. It was the first build¬ 
ing I had ever seen lifted up and moving. 

There was still snow on the ground. It had been 
a long, hard winter. They were spreading lime on 
the meadows. Six or seven calves had already ar¬ 
rived, and were playing about in the calf barn. On 
the Home Place there were three baby colts. There 
were more yet to come. Poltron, or Polly, the Bel¬ 
gian draft stallion, was bigger and more handsome 
than ever. Sliver and American Beauty, Madge 
Wildfire and Vermont Toddington, Toddy, Justice 
Bingen, Lady and Sister, and the rest, knew and 
recognized us. There was the usual raft of kittens. 
Many baby chicks and ducklings were on the way. 
As yet, little could be done on the land; it was too 
cold and wet. On the Home Place, too, they were 
top-dressing the grass land with lime, where it was 
needed. The remaining acres were fertilized with 
manure. 

One morning, while we were at breakfast, the 
Doctor was called to the telephone. He returned, 
saying that there was trouble in the cow barn. One 


WINGS ARE FULL-GROWN 


233 


of the three-year old heifers had aborted. Her 
calf was dead, and she was sick. In all probability, 
he continued, he would not return home from the 
South Place before night. It was not alone a ques¬ 
tion of the sick heifer, but the whole cow barn must 
be thoroughly cleaned and disinfected. I asked 
why. “I have already given the order to turn all 
the cows into the paddock without delay. You see, 
abortion in cows, and in mares also, seems to be an 
infectious thing. I hope we shall not lose more of 
our increase.” 

When I rode down in the afternoon, every inch 
of that new barn had been sprayed with a solution 
of formaldehyde. It was receiving a coat of white¬ 
wash. They used a barrel spray and pump for this 
operation, had it connected up with the engine in 
the well house. In this way the work was quickly 
and thoroughly done. It smelled like a hospital on 
visiting day. The Doctor was in the midst of it all, 
directing everything and everybody. His new cor¬ 
duroy riding suit was ruined completely. “Who 
cares,” he said, “no germs on it, anyway.” Scotty, 
the black spaniel, was a sight to behold, his shiny 
coat splashed with lime. Even Beauty and her 
immaculate saddle and bridle were spotted white. 
“We’re having a grand cleaning-up, inside and out. 
When we get through, we’ll be innocence itself.” 

The hay barn had descended from its rollers and 
was in place. Carpenters were at work building the 
ells and reshingling the roof with slate. This barn, 


234 


WINGED SEEDS 


as well as hog house and hen house and the calf barn 
were to be whitewashed. The Doctor was pleased 
with the efficient and quick work of his spray pump. 
“Don’t you want us to whitewash some part of the 
Stone House for you?” he asked. He needed no 
answer. He well knew how happy I was to have 
no work or workmen at our home. 

All this happened on a Saturday. Before we left, 
I watched the men at evening chores. Instead of 
the usual four quarts of oats per feed, each draft 
horse received a soft bran mash with a tablespoonful 
of saltpeter in addition. “Why do they get this 
feed?” I asked the Doctor. “This is their regular 
Saturday night feed both here and at the Home 
barn. It is given in lieu of tonic or condition pow¬ 
ders, and keeps the horses in good trim, added to 
their Sunday rest. It is a sort of preventive medi¬ 
cine, you see, like giving the calves a dose of raw 
linseed or castor oil, or inoculating horses for dis¬ 
temper, or calves for blackleg.” 

Most certainly, farming with intelligence and 
foresight means knowing myriad related and unre¬ 
lated facts. Everything one has ever studied, 
everything one can ever learn, has some bearing, in 
some way on the farm problem. In the language of 
the publishing world, there is not only one slant to 
the farming game; the slants are illimitable in 
number. 

The cold, gray spring merged into silver and blue, 
into gold and green. Birds sang, mated. Meadow 


WINGS ARE FULL-GROWN 


235 

grass came alive. Trees bloomed in woods and in 
orchards. The land was seeded, the gardens were 
planted. Seeded things sprouted, grew their wings, 
and worshiped the sun. 

“For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and 
gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of 
singing of birds is come; and the voice of the turtle 
is heard in our land.” 

It was summer. Our Donatello baby smiled, 
laughed with the roses, white, pink, yellow, crim¬ 
son. Our rose garden was a happy, peaceful place, 
a place of color and song. Cultivating, pruning, 
even spraying was joyous work. 

The orchard grass on the Lake Farm was gar¬ 
nered and in the barn. They began haying on the 
South Farm. First they cut the grass in the hundred- 
acre meadow. It had in it a large quantity of June 
grass, and, what was worse, there was sorrel, and 
quack or witch grass. Therefore the Doctor 
planned to top-dress the entire area with manure, 
directly after haying; then to plough it and to let it 
lie fallow over the winter; in spring, it would be 
harrowed and planted to corn. The second plough¬ 
ing in the succeeding autumn would, he hoped, do 
away with the foul weeds. In the spring following, 
it could be planted to oats, barley and wheat, the 
latter in the highest and best-drained part of the 
meadow. At the same time the land could be 
stocked down to timothy and clover, part red top, 
part alsike, a white clover. In this way, the neces- 


WINGED SEEDS 


236 

sary crop rotation would be achieved and thereby 
the land brought back to hay. 

For use on the South Farm, where the hay area 
was large, the Doctor had bought a hay loader, a 
side delivery rake and a tractor. I saw these im¬ 
plements used for the first time that year. To-day 
we have them on all surrounding farms, but in those 
days they were rare in our neighborhood. The side 
delivery rake eliminates the necessity for tumbling 
hay. It gathers the sun-dried grass in its revolving 
arms and leaves it in long windrows, great bundles 
ready rolled for the hay loader. The hay loader is 
a wood and steel implement that works on an end¬ 
less chain principle. It is attached to the end of the 
hay wagon with its big rack, and is drawn either by 
horse power or by tractor. The man who loads 
must work quickly, for the hay loader lifts the hay 
from the windrows on to the rack without 
interruption. 

Both these haying tools, like the hay fork, save 
time and man power. But I preferred by far the 
more leisurely haying on the Lake Farm. It was 
so much more old-timey and picturesque to see the 
men pitching hay on to the rack, chaffing each other, 
and all the rest of it. I said as much to the Doctor. 
“Told you you belonged to the Middle Ages,” he 
retorted. 

It was a corn year. There was sufficient moisture, 
and the August sun was hot. Dr. Wheeler, the soil 
expert, when he came for the second time to Big 


WINGS ARE FULL-GROWN 


237 


Oak Farm, and brought Mrs. Wheeler with him, 
said that he had never seen finer corn, even in the 
Kansas corn belt. There was a big corn field be¬ 
yond the old orchard. I sat under the wide-spread¬ 
ing branches of a Northern Spy tree and watched 
that great field of corn for hours at a time, wonder¬ 
ing at its dim, green aloofness, its strange rustling 
and murmuring, the living, swaying grace of it. 

Days grew into months, and summer passed. 
The wind was cold at night. There were Northern 
lights and brilliant stars. The vines on the Stone 
House were wreathed about and over the lower 
windows. They were fruited with charming, dull- 
purple berries. Underneath the vivid green leaves 
there was a shimmer of dim copper. Apples on the 
old trees showed fast-brightening tints of red and 
gold. Our grain was cut and stacked. Our corn 
had tasseled out, was in the milk, about ready to 
harvest. Millet carried its woolly brown heads 
erect on its strong green stalks. Squirrels and chip¬ 
munks were busily gathering their winter stores. 
They worked with the accompaniment of much chat¬ 
ter. Outer hulls of hickory, or walnuts as we Ver¬ 
monters call them, and of butternuts were showing 
signs of bursting. The radiant air was filled with 
gold and silver mist. The color in the marsh was 
beautiful, a riot of bright, soft reds, browns, and 
yellows, with a sky of amber and cobalt. 

Each day flocks of birds gathered, drifted, fled. 
Black duck and teal fed in the wild rice of the creeks 


WINGED SEEDS 


238 

and marshes. Muskrats swam about in the reeds, 
looking for likely places to build their winter homes. 
The days were noticeably shorter. There was 
moonlight in the east before the after-glow of sun¬ 
set faded in the west. Cosmos and chrysanthemum 
were abloom in my garden. The silver birch among 
the evergreens of our rose garden had leaves of 
purest gold. Blue aster and goldenrod starred the 
roadsides. It was autumn. 

In our hill-enclosed pastures brood mares with 
suckling colts at foot grazed happily. It was the 
time of County Fairs and Grange Meetings. Pol- 
tron brought home his blue ribbons. At the races, 
Madge Wildfire won laurels again and again. 
“Pure joy,” said the man of dreams. 

Yes, autumn had come. The stress of the farm 
year was ended. Autumn, and we were at home. 
New York with its restless clamor was of another 
world. 

“Want to come and watch us threshing?” the 
Doctor asked one morning, when our wood fire was 
a grateful breakfast accompaniment. We rode to 
the big barn by the Slang Bridge where the new 
thresher had been set up. The tractor was used for 
power. The thresher is a fascinating machine to 
watch. It brings into related activity so many dif¬ 
ferent operations. Teams drive up with great loads 
of golden grain in bundles tied by the reaper and 
binder. They drive close to the platform, on which 
stands a man who feeds the hungry maw of the 


WINGS ARE FULL-GROWN 


239 


thresher with the precious bundles, just as fast as he 
can handle them. The men on the teams toss the 
bundles down to him. The machine cuts open the 
bundles, separates the heads of the grain from the 
stalks, and the kernels from the hulls. 

On one side of the thresher a man hangs up grain 
bags into which the grain pours in a continuous 
stream. He has barely time to tie up the bags, 
shove them aside to be loaded and carried by team 
to the granary, before the next two bags are filled. 
The hulls, chaff and weeds come out on the opposite 
side. A river of bright yellow straw flows out over 
the end of the thresher on an ever-moving canvas 
path. At this end two men make a great stack of 
the straw. Dust and chaff flies about and envelops 
men and machines, horses and wagons in dim clouds. 
It all goes like a house afire, machinery rattling, 
tractor puffing, wagons creaking. One gets the im¬ 
pression of splendid co-operation and efficiency of 
men and of tools. It must go in unison, each opera¬ 
tion must dove-tail accurately with the next, or the 
entire threshing is tied up. When this happens 
everyone breathes deep with relief, takes a long look 
around, a new chew of tobacco, and then begins to 
swear at whatever has gone wrong with tractor or 
belt, with chains or suction pipe. At the end of the 
afternoon, our maids drive down to see the thresh¬ 
ing and to bring a cold drink for the workers. 

While they were still threshing in the big barn, 
I saw another interesting tool at work on the South 


240 


WINGED SEEDS 


Farm. The corn harvester is a heavy implement 
drawn by three horses. It works on the same prin¬ 
ciple as a grain reaper and binder. It mows the 
corn in even swathes, makes it into huge bundles, 
ties them up, cuts the twine, and drops the bundles, 
all automatically. I hated to see the splendid, up¬ 
standing corn ignominiously felled to earth. It has 
not long to wait before silo-filling. Corn, in order 
to keep its nutritive quality, must be shredded 
and put into the silo before it loses its juicy fresh¬ 
ness. 

Two days later, silo-filling began. Silos are queer 
structures. They look for all the world like huge 
hollow pipes set on end and weighted to earth with 
concrete. Teams bring up the great green bundles 
of corn. They are fed into the shredding machine. 
Not a morsel of the entire plant is wasted, from 
tassel to stalk. It is all cut up, and literally blown 
through a succession of pipes into the silo. 

Inside the structure a man keeps the constant 
stream of shredded corn evenly distributed, and 
treads it down. There must be no air spaces, else 
fermentation will set in too early, and the ensilage 
will deteriorate. The freshly-shredded corn has a 
pungent, aromatic smell, to which fermentation later 
adds a winey touch. Cattle thrive on ensilage corn, 
which is fed to them once or twice per day, besides 
their clover hay. Only the milkers are grained in 
addition. After a wait of ten days to two weeks, 
when the ensilage in the silo has settled, the silos 




Looking Northwest from the Balustrade at Sunset. 








WINGS ARE FULL-GROWN 


241 


were refilled. The remaining corn was set up in 
stooks like the field corn, to dry in the open. With 
this done, the stress of harvest time was ended. 
The day laborers could be dismissed. Fall plough¬ 
ing was begun on both farms. 

One night, we had our first heavy frost, and lo, 
the ampelopsis was aflame. In their leafy coverts, 
Spys and Baldwins glowed like Japanese lanterns. 
Maples and beeches hung out streamers of vivid 
scarlet and Etruscan gold. It was the 

“Season of mellow fruitfulness, 

Close bosom friend of the maturing sun.” 

The days were filled with glorious sun and sky 
and wind and color. The nights were made of 
magic stars and moon and mist and shadow. 

We were alone on Hallowe’en, a night that sang 
of harvest and fulfillment. The hunters’ moon was 
at its full, and wrapped our world in luminous veils 
of peace and silence. The balustrade was bright 
silver, tarnished in places with shadows of the Stone 
House. Golden-crowned elms and birches glowed 
palely. “Honey pale,” like Theocritus’ shepherdess, 
they seemed, among the velvet black of pines and 
cedars. There was no sound but a screech owl’s 
strange, fateful voice at intervals, a voice we both 
loved; mystic rhythms that ask the age-old ques¬ 
tion, that seek the eternal answer to the riddle of 
the Sphinx, which is life. 

It was a night for dreams. Our dreams had 


242 


WINGED SEEDS 


come true. The seeds we had found in Walter 
Clark’s studio so long, long ago, had grown their 
wings. They were full-fledged, winged seeds, seeds 
of victory. 








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